


be still, my indelible friend

by becksolo



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bad Science, F/M, Kylo Ren is a Ghost, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Rey's new home comes with a catch, Would you smooch a ghost?, let's mash up some random fanfic cliches, rey is a baker
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-19
Updated: 2019-12-15
Packaged: 2020-01-16 07:35:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 36,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18516865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/becksolo/pseuds/becksolo
Summary: “Beg all you want,” the man spoke, “this isn’t going to work.”The man reached his hand out towards Beebee again as if he was going to pet him, and when his hand should have met with cat belly, it instead seemed to keep going. His hand went through Beebee entirely. It was then that Rey noticed the man didn’t appear to be entirely there; if she focused, she could see through him, to what was behind him.She found her feet moving towards him almost of their own volition, simultaneously excited and terrified to actually be able to make direct contact with the ghost. “You.”





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> hi there! more than this actually being a first chapter, this is more of a preview. i'm posting this mostly just to get it out there and gauge if it's something people would be interested in reading?? a lot of this brief "chapter" is subject to change as i work on this more. i haven't written any reylo before so here's a fun new adventure

“You’re sure about this?” The words bounced off of the walls in the mostly empty room, causing a little bit of an echo.

“Yes, Finn, for the fiftieth time, I am completely sure,” Rey answered, a little laugh escaping her and, again, making an echo.

Once there was furniture filling the space, and maybe curtains on the walls, the echo would become less of an issue, but for now it, admittedly, made the space feel a little bit intimidating. Not that she was going to be scared out of this now. She had come too far to back down now because her new townhouse in a good neighborhood with nice hardwood floors was _temporarily_ a little bit creepy.

Finn opened his mouth to speak, but Rey shook her head, moving over to him and shaking her head. “It’s fine, I promise,” she told him, giving him a smile to try to help reassure him. “You’re only going to be fifteen minutes away.”

The thing was this: Finn and Rey had lived together for years. It felt like forever, though Rey keenly remembered the days before he had entered her life; she was fairly certain that she could neatly separate her life into ‘Before Finn’ and ‘After Finn’ in terms of how incredibly lonely she had felt and how her outlook on life had shifted because of him. Finn had grown up in the foster system and fate had eventually caused their paths to cross and they had been inseparable since.

But, as life tended to go, things couldn’t last like that forever. About a year and a half ago, Finn had met Poe. And Poe was wonderful, and everything that Rey could’ve ever asked for in a boyfriend for her best friend. It had come as new real surprise when, as they started getting renewal reminders from their apartment complex, that Finn broached the subject of him _not_ renewing so that he could instead move in with Poe. Despite his promise to not leave her high and dry and to help find her a new roommate, she had declined, and chose not to renew either.

“That’s fifteen long minutes. By car. You don’t own a car,” Finn pointed out.

“We would’ve been farther apart if I had stayed in our old apartment,” she said. “And this place is _way_ nicer. You don’t have to worry about someone breaking in and murdering me in my sleep.” She flashed him a quick grin before she settled herself on the floor, prying open the cardboard box which held the air mattress that would be her bed for the time being – her old twin bed had done its job, but now that she had a new place, it felt like time to upgrade.

The only problem being, of course, that moving into a new place (a nicer, bigger place, with no roommate no less) was expensive, and coincidentally, new queen-sized beds were also expensive.

“Okay, yes, true. But I’m still allowed to worry about you,” he protested as he helped her pull the air mattress out of the box and unroll it across the floor.

“You are,” she said, leaning over to lightly peck his cheek affectionately. “And I appreciate that. But we’re still close, we’re still going to see each other all the time, and there’s public transport just a block away from my front door.”

They’d had this conversation before. Change was hard, and though Rey knew that he wasn’t having second thoughts about moving in with Poe, she couldn’t blame him for being a little bit concerned about no longer having her just down the hall.

“I know, I know,” he said. “I just… I don’t know. This place still kind of gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

Rey groaned. “Not that again.”

“ _Yes_ , that again,” he said. “You’re still going to tell me that you don’t feel anything weird here?”

In order to prevent him from going on, she quickly grabbed the cord for the air mattress and plugged it in, turning on the pump and filling the room with sound to drown out anything further that Finn might try to say.

Rey had gotten a really good deal on this townhouse – an unbelievable deal, really. Rey hadn’t had any intention of buying a home, until she had accidentally come across the listing online. It had been sitting vacant for a bit, and the feedback that the realtor had gotten from showings could apparently only be charitably described as “discouraging.” The place was cold, despite the thermostat being set to an appropriate seventy-one degrees Fahrenheit (a measurement Rey was still getting used to), and Finn had sworn that there was a creepy aura to it.

A few Google searches had turned up nothing bad happening in the townhouse, and after getting the chance to talk to a couple of the neighbors, none of whom had known nearly anything about the previous occupant or where they had gone (plus, no mention of any police or rescue activity, suggesting that at least there wasn’t some sort of brutal murder), Rey had decided to move forward. The price was too good to say no to, and she was in a position where she could get a decent loan, and it was so nice. If something terrible had happened here, she was none the wiser.

Fortunately, once the air mattress was filled, Finn seemed to be willing to move on from the subject. He’d tried to talk her out of buying the house a couple of times because of the bad feeling it had given her, but had failed at every turn, so she supposed he knew when to quit by now.

They worked in tandem getting the sheets and a couple of pillows arranged on the air mattress, and once it was done Rey flopped down onto it, splaying herself out like a starfish, grinning up at Finn. “Ah, home sweet air bed,” she said.

Rolling his eyes, he nudged the air mattress, watching as it wobbled a little bit underneath her. “Last chance, you can still come back and stay with Poe and I until you at least get a real bed in here.”

Rey shook her head, waving off Finn’s offer dismissively. “No, no. You two have already had to put up with me for too long. You haven’t gotten the chance to properly… christen the bedroom,” she said. It had turned out that buying a property took way longer than Rey had anticipated, and when the lease at their old apartment had run out, she’d gone to stay at Poe’s apartment until her closing.

“You do realize that Poe’s lived there forever, and we have definitely already _christened_ his bed?”

“Shhh, gross,” she protested, though her laugh and the grin on her face were at odds with her words. She pushed herself to sit up, looking at him as she said teasingly, “But I bet that ‘we live together now’ sex is better. And you’ve got to find that out.”

“Maybe so,” he said. “But I’m not even going to do that tonight, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy it, knowing you’re here alone in an empty, creepy townhouse all alone.”

“Finn,” she groaned. “I will be fine. We’re not kids anymore. And I was always the tough one between us anyway. Go have fun.”

Finn hesitated for a bit longer, taking his time with helping her place sheets on the air mattress and get it arranged so that it would at least be a somewhat comfortable place to sleep until she got around to actually getting herself a real bed.

When he no longer had any excuses to stick around longer, Finn gave her a lingering hug before heading for the door. “Call me if you need anything, okay? Anytime, I’ll pick up,” he told her.

“I know, Finn,” she said softly, giving him a smile before ushering him towards the door. “But I’ll be fine, I promise.” She kissed his cheek and squeezed his shoulder before stepping back, allowing him to leave her home and closing the door behind him.

She missed him immediately.

This place would feel like home soon enough, and Rey knew that, but for the time being is was still a little… cold, and not in the literal sense that Finn insisted it was. It was a bit lifeless yet, the bulk of her things still in boxes that Finn and Poe had helped her carry in. Posters and tapestries would be hung up, and she would eventually collect her plants from their apartment and no doubt add new ones to the collection, but first…

Nothing made a place feel like home more than fresh, warm baked goods.

She returned to the kitchen, where she had left a carefully packed box that held everything that she needed to make a batch of cookies – it was simple, but it was welcoming and familiar, and that was what she needed.

Rey’s one true love, she would joke, was baking. It had been something that she had stumbled upon by accident, answering a wanted ad when she was still in schooling, assuming that the busy little bakery would just be a way to keep herself afloat. It turned out that her hands were better matched for the often-delicate work far more than she could have imagined. Over time, she had found herself dedicating more and more time to it, to the point that she had been able to rely on it as her sole income, and it had become something of a part of her identity.

She didn’t _own_ the bakeshop and it wasn’t her name on the sign, but she more or less ran the place. As the petite woman who had first hired Rey had grown older, her attention had wandered elsewhere, leaving the shop in Rey’s hands. She didn’t mind the extra responsibility it left her with, since that responsibility also meant that she had more freedom to experiment and grow and make decisions on her own.

It also meant, of course, a bigger paycheck, which meant that she could finally have a home with a real kitchen, so that she could make herself treats and try out new recipes without having to return to the shop.

She turned on her phone to play music just to have background noise as she worked. By now something as simple as this was like second nature, and she could go through the motions on autopilot, measuring ingredients by feel rather than with cups and spoons.

When the music started to skip a bit, she blamed it on Spotify acting up, or perhaps the internet here wasn’t as reliable as it had been in her old apartment. Nothing to be too concerned about.

When she opened the oven door and the comforting, sweet smell of freshly baked cookies filled the room, she breathed out a content sigh, and disregarded the fact that she was sure she heard a similar sound coming from somewhere behind her. There was an echo here, she had to remind herself. And if the answering sigh sounded nothing like herself, well, she was imagining things. She was absolutely not going to allow Finn’s delusions to get her worked up.

When she sat down on the air mattress and pulled out her laptop to watch Netflix as she ate the cookies, she was completely alone. Everything was quiet, just the way it was supposed to be.


	2. Chapter Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi hi, as you can tell the update schedule for this is gonna be... erratic, to say the least. i also feel like posting as i write and writing just whenever i have time is gonna mess up the flow of this, so probably once it's over i'll go back and, like, clean it up and tighten it up.

Over the course of the next few weeks, Rey started to fall into a routine.

First thing in the morning, she would get up and make herself a cup of coffee. She would nibble on a piece of toast or maybe some sort of baked good. Occasionally, she got the feeling that she wasn’t alone, but that was probably just her imagination.

After breakfast, she would head out to work, and that kept her busy. She didn’t even think about her new home, except for when she would take a break for lunch and do a little bit of shopping online for décor or looking over Craigslist for cheap furniture.

In the evenings, admittedly, she spent a little bit more time at Finn and Poe’s than she might have done normally. But her apartment was still so empty – they would come over and help her unpack her things, but it was always a slow process – and they were always there for her, so it just felt natural to spend time with them. It had nothing to do with the fact that she never quite felt alone in her townhouse.

When she had days off, she would drag Rose out to thrift shops and the charity furniture store to get things for her apartment. The other girl had an eye for things that would pull together a room like none of her other friends did, and, well, Rose had a truck whereas no one else she knew did.

On an afternoon after a trip to the Goodwill where she had found an interesting wall hanging, she stood on a chair to pin it up.

When she stepped back to look at it, she felt that same rush of cool air run through her that she had been working hard to ignore.

And then, “That doesn’t look right there.”

She looked over towards where Rose was standing, though the voice she had heard was 1) on the complete opposite side of the room from where her friend was standing, and 2) deep, much deeper than Rose’s, and almost definitely male. “Did you say something?”

“Hm? No,” Rose answered, looking back at her. “Though I think I might go grab the other nightstand.”

“Need help with that?”

Looking back at her with a little grin, she waved Rey off. “Nope. This means that I don’t have to go to the gym today.”

It made Rey laugh, which was a good distraction for all of two second until she was alone in the room again and suddenly the goosebumps she felt were all the more apparent again.

“Hello?” she spoke into the empty room, though there was no answer. She wasn’t sure whether the silence was more comforting or unsettling.

She went back and pulled the hanging off of the wall and moved it to the end of the hallway. This time the only commentary was Rose telling her that it looked absolutely perfect there.

That night, she laid awake in the dark emptiness of her room thinking about the voice she had heard. She eventually comforted herself with the reaffirmation that it was nothing and she was probably just imagining a fake voice that was speaking her own concerns. After all, the little tapestry _hadn’t_ looked right where she’d put it at first.

She wasn’t sure that she believed it, but it allowed her to get to sleep.

* * *

 That would have been enough, if it hadn’t kept happening.

* * *

 At about two in the morning, Rey stumbled, bleary eyed, down the hall to go to the bathroom. She passed by the open door to what in theory would become her office, and in the moonlight coming in through the windows, she was almost certain that she saw the distinct shape of a person sitting by the window. No shadow, but still, there was someone there.

When she looked back to take a second glance, there was nothing there. She had left a flannel shirt draped over the back of a chair, and that was probably all that it was.

* * *

The next encounter was when she was leaning against her kitchen island, watching bacon crackle on her griddle. It was her day off and she had no plans, so it felt like a proper breakfast was in order. “What I wouldn’t give to…” the voice commented. She could tell that there were more words beyond that, but she couldn’t make them out.

For a moment, she thought about ignoring it. After all, this was all just her imagination, at best. But if it was her imagination, then maybe it wouldn’t hurt to indulge in it a little bit.

“What you wouldn’t give to what?”

But there was no answer, and while she wasn’t surprised by that, she was a little bit surprised to find that she was a little bit disappointed.

* * *

Rey was starting to consider the possibility that she was going a little bit insane. She kept hearing that voice, or what sounded like footsteps on the stairs, or thinking that she was seeing something out of the corner of her eye.

She had never considered herself a superstitious type. There were a lot of things in this world that she couldn’t explain, but most of the time science had it covered.

(She’d once held dreams of becoming a famous doctor and making some sort of scientific discovery so that everyone in the world might know her name – but local “fame” for having the best muffins in town was definitely good enough for her.)

But, well, this didn’t feel so cut and dried.

The facts were these: Rey lived alone, but regularly heard and saw things that suggested the presence of another person being in the house with her. When other people came to visit her, they never heard anything, though admittedly didn’t hear much out of him – it had to be a him, she reasoned – when she wasn’t alone, either.

After doing a little bit of research on sudden hallucinations and mental illnesses and carbon monoxide poisoning, she ultimately decided to rule out anything of that nature. She knew that it was possible, but something in her gut told her that this was something a bit more out of the realm of normal possibility.

Which led to a series of Google searches:

_are ghosts real?_

_how do i know if a ghost is dangerous?_

_how can you tell if your new house is haunted?_

_buzzfeed unsolved phone number_

_can animals detect ghosts_

After that last search informed her that “cats are very perceptive of both the physical and spiritual realms,” she found herself impulsively going to the animal shelter.

It wasn’t _purely_ to find out if a cat might react to the possible ghost in her house, to be fair. She had always liked the thought of having a pet, and cats were a bit more low maintenance than dogs which was good given her schedule. Her apartment would have a little bit more life to it, and even if there was no ghost to be found, she could at least write off strange occurrences as being the cat. She had been in her new home for about a month and a half, and she was finally almost entirely unpacked and settled in. It felt like the right time, finally.

When a chunky orange and white tabby cat looked at her with big round eyes and meowed at her, she had been a goner.

“Welcome home, Bee!” she announced brightly as she set the cardboard cat carrier they had given her on the floor, unfolding the flaps and pulling them back.

Almost immediately, the cat jumped out of the box with a happy little chirp. He sniffed the air around them, surprisingly graceful paws carrying him around the room. Rey followed him as he padded around each room of the house – sometimes revisiting the same room two or three times, as one couldn’t expect a cat to stay on task – investigating his new home, but nothing too out of the ordinary happened.

Google had told her that a cat might hiss randomly or seem to be staring at nothing if they were in the presence of a ghost. Beebee (a name that had been given to the cat by the shelter, which she was not sure whether she was going to change or not) was doing none of these things. He did briefly seem spooked, but that was because of purely mundane reasons – someone down on the street outside made a loud sound.

Maybe there was no ghost, or maybe she had gotten a defective cat. Whatever it was, she was content to have Beebee around. He was fun, and he was only minimally invasive when it came time for her to try to be productive. It was the perfect arrangement.

And then she came home one evening to hear Beebee upstairs chattering. It wasn’t all that unusual, he was a chatty little thing, but usually it was to get her attention, or to complain to her when she hadn’t fed him recently enough.

She opened her mouth to respond to him as she headed up the stairs, but stopped short when she heard a voice. That same voice. She hadn’t heard it nearly as much since she had gotten the cat, and some part of her had wondered if maybe just having him around had driven away whatever wayward spirit was inhabiting her house, or maybe the lack of loneliness had caused her to stop imagining things.

“I don’t know what you expect me to do,” the voice was saying, and seemingly in response there was another series of little meows.

When Rey reached the top of the stairs and rounded the corner, she was treated to the sight of her cat rolling over onto his back, back feet stretching out while his front paws curled up against his chest. While she had heard that other cats liked to trick their humans by luring them in like this then attacking their hands, Beebee generally seemed to be a big fan of belly pats.

More interestingly, however, was the fact that there was a man in her home.

He was seated on the floor, facing Beebee, a frown on his lips. His legs were folded underneath him somewhat awkwardly, and she could tell even though he was sitting that he was tall. And he was broad. Frankly, he looked pretty frightening, except for the fact that he was apparently talking to a cat, and the look on his face was deeply troubled.

“Beg all you want,” the man spoke, and _holy shit, that’s the voice_ , “this isn’t going to work.”

The man reached his hand out towards Beebee again as if he was going to pet him, and when his hand should have met with cat belly, it instead seemed to keep going. His hand went through Beebee entirely. It was then that Rey noticed the man didn’t appear to be entirely there; if she focused, she could see through him, to what was behind him.

She found her feet moving towards him almost of their own volition, simultaneously excited and terrified to actually be able to make direct contact with the ghost. “ _You_.”

His head snapped up and his eyes went wide as he realized that he was caught. He almost looked afraid. For a moment, neither of them spoke, and then he started to get to his feet. “You can see me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> normally i headcanon modern au bb-8 as a corgi, but in this case it felt right to have him be a cat.  
> come say hi on tumblr (kylocrystal) or twitter (@becksolo)


	3. Chapter Three

“You can see me.”

Rey didn’t say anything for a moment, too busy staring at the man because yes, _obviously_ , she could see him. He was standing right in front of her. And yes, he was a bit translucent, which was bothersome to say the least, but he wasn’t invisible. “Yes, I can see you,” she said. “What are you doing here?” Looking down at Beebee, she added, “Get away from my cat.”

The man looked at her for a moment like _she_ was the crazy one, moving towards her for a moment before taking a small step backwards. “Your cat is the one who needs to leave me alone,” he said, looking back down towards the cat, who was rolling back over onto his feet. She noticed briefly that his voice sounded as if it were coming from the end of a long hallway, almost echoing a little bit as it rang in her ears.

Shaking her head, she huffed and moved forward to collect Beebee up in her arms. She was about to open her mouth to defend him (she may not have had him for long, but she already felt a connection to Beebee, and she wasn’t about to let anything happen to him in her watch) but she fell short of it, realizing as she cradled the cat to her chest that she was shaking.

There was a strange man in her house, there was no one else around, and all she had to protect herself was a cat. Her friends would be far enough away that if she managed to call them, they would likely still end up too late to help her if this man tried to do anything. While she enjoyed the privacy this townhouse gave her, it did also mean there were fewer neighbors to hear her and come to her aid.

But then she got a hold of herself – she had just watched this man completely fail to pet her cat. It was entirely possible that he wasn’t physically tangible at all; if he couldn’t touch a cat, could he touch her? She had heard his voice in her apartment in days past, and he hadn’t made any attempts to harm or even really make meaningful contact with her. And in any case, she had lived with Unkar Plutt for the better part of her life and she had never let anything happen to her.

With that in mind and Beebee cradled against her chest, she straightened herself up to her full height (still significantly shorter than him, but it was something, anyway) and spoke. “Who are you, and what are you doing in my house?”

“I live here,” he said. There was a moment’s pause, and he furrowed his brow slightly, then added, “I lived here, maybe. I’ve gotten the impression that I’m not so much… _living_.”

“Um,” she said, briefly at a loss for anything else to say. It wasn’t as though it was a surprise, being that she had already entertained the possibility that there was a ghost in her apartment previously, and he did have a certain translucence that spoke to the image she had in her mind of ghosts.

“This was my house, when I was alive,” he went on when she didn’t say anything further. He looked around the room, a small frown on his lips. “It doesn’t feel that long ago.”

Rey had, frankly, no idea what to tell this man. Some part of her was still a bit concerned, a bit convinced that this was going to turn into some story that would end up on the nightly news. But, better to pack that fear away for the time being to deal with later.

“Okay, honestly, I don’t care how long ago it was, or whether or not this was your house, this is my house now,” she said, and the way his head snapped back to face her, she had to guess that he had entirely forgotten that she was there. “You have to go.”

A deep inhale. Then nothing, for a long time. “I tried,” he said after a moment. “I know that much. I woke up here, like any other day, and when I tried to leave, everything was… I lost my grip on reality.”

Every single word that this man said, it seemed, was bound to confuse the hell out of her. She was getting nowhere, and it wasn’t doing anything to put her at ease. “You lost your grip on reality?” she echoed.

He looked at her for a moment, then shook his head. There was an air about him that seemed to suggest that he didn’t think she would be able to understand, like he was so much better than her for the simple fact of being dead. “But even if I _could_ leave, this is my house,” he said, his arms moving out to indicate the space around them. “I bought it when it was first built, I have every right to be here.”

“Well, that’s great and all, but you don’t own it anymore.”

That did seem to give him pause for just a moment; while she didn’t know a whole lot about the legalities of death and what that meant for a home, she could assume that since she had bought the townhouse, it was, in fact, hers.

A voice echoing up from the bottom of the stairs distracted her for a moment. “Knock knock, I tested out the key you gave me!”

“Damn, I was hoping it wouldn’t work,” she called out teasingly. In the midst of finally receiving confirmation of the ghost, she had nearly forgotten that she had invited Finn and Poe over for a movie night. “Make yourself at home, I’ll be right down.”

When she turned back to speak to the ghost again, he had disappeared. She peeked into the next room over, and when she found nothing, she resigned herself to the fact that he was simply gone, for now.

Heading down the stairs, she considered for a moment telling her friends about what she had seen. But no, she could only imagine how Finn in particular would react, and she could at least try to deal with this on her own.

Poe had invited himself into the kitchen and was opening cabinets in search of something. He cast a glance over his shoulder at her, asking, “Paper plates?”

“Hm… I actually don’t have any,” she said.

“Oh, look at this. Our Rey, a big time adult, a real homeowner, finally too fancy for paper plates,” he teased, the tone in his voice making it clear that he was just teasing her, with all the affection in the world.

“Oh, quiet, you,” she said, rolling her eyes at him though the smile on her lips betrayed her. “It’s just easier keeping up with dishes when it’s just me here.”

Poe nodded, leaning back against the counter. “Alright, I’m letting you off, just this once,” he said, waggling a finger at her. Looking around, he asked, “So, how’s this place treating you, now that you’ve had time to settle in?”

“It’s nice,” she said, nodding. “It’s still a little weird living on my own, but I’m getting used to it. If it starts to bother me too much, I can always look into getting a roommate.”

She can’t, probably, if there’s a ghost still taking up residence here, but that wasn’t the point, and she wasn’t going to mention that.

There was a bit more teasing and catching up – it wasn’t as though they hadn’t seen each other since she had moved, but it was a lot different going from seeing Finn every day and Poe most days – before they were all settled on the couch together with a couple of pizzas laid out on the coffee table, a movie on the TV.

It was an action movie of some sort, something that Finn had picked up from Redbox on his way out of the store, and Rey was finding it hard to keep herself focused. While she usually had no problem following fast-paced fight scenes, everything was flying past her eyes too quickly for her to process it that evening, and she knew that it was because her mind was still stuck in the brief encounter she had had with the ghost.

Glancing over at Finn and Poe to make sure they were focused on the movie before reminding herself she had no reason to need to be sneaky, she pulled her phone from her pocket and unlocked it, pulling up the Google homepage.

_how do i get rid of a ghost in my house?_

The results she found were… interesting. At one point in her life, she would have laughed at some of these websites. Some of them were outdated in design, looking like they had been designed in the early 2000s by a thirteen-year-old with only a rudimentary understanding of HTML, which didn’t start them out on the right foot as far as trustworthiness was concerned.

As for their content… Well, that was definitely questionable. Before all of this, she probably would have laughed her way reading out the instructions aloud to Finn and Poe, and they would’ve all had a good time about it. But that was all in a time when ghosts _obviously_ were not real, and Rey definitely didn’t have one living in her home.

So instead she didn’t say anything to them; maybe once this was all over and done with, she could tell them and have a good laugh about it, but for now it somehow felt like something that she needed to keep a lid on. She just bookmarked a couple of pages, and tried to distract herself from the problem at hand by focusing on the movie.

* * *

 

Over the next few days, Rey kept waiting to see the ghost again.

Every time she walked in the door, she would pause for a moment, to listen for anything that was out of the ordinary. She would look around whenever she felt the slightest bit cold, in case it was his presence making itself known again.

She wasn’t sure whether or not she was grateful to not come face to face with him again.

Of course, even though she didn’t see him, she still knew that he was there. It was like she could feel him, though a part of her was also willing to admit to the possibility that it was just a matter of her becoming paranoid and spotting signs of him where there were none, but she was confident that wasn’t the case.

Plus, there was the matter of Beebee, who was proving to be more capable as a ghost-hunting cat than he initially had appeared. At times, she would hear him flailing about in another room, or dashing through the door with wide eyes and seeking affection, or just yelling at the top of his lungs. She knew that this was relatively normal cat behavior – cats were _weird_ – but the odd moments were few and far enough between that it felt significant. Again, it was possible that she was seeing things just because she wanted to, but she thought she knew better. After all, she was completely certain that the ghost hadn’t been in her imagination.

The _ghost_. She hadn’t even learned his name.

Eventually, she decided that she had to at least give what she had read a shot, even if this ghost wasn’t giving her any trouble. It was surely just a matter of time, after all, and she knew that it was often best to be proactive.

The different websites that she had looked at had given her different recommendations and courses of action, but overall it appeared that all supernatural experts agreed that the proper first step to banishing a ghost was a simple one – ask them to leave.

So she made her way up the stairs to the same place that she had first seen the man. She knew that, based on where she’d thought she had heard him in the past, that there was no real benefit to choosing there over anywhere else in the townhouse, but it _was_ the most solid evidence she had gotten, which had to count for something.

“Hello?” she called out.

Silence.

“Hi, it’s me,” she said.

A meow. Beebee had joined her, winding himself around her ankles, and she found it to be a surprising comfort.

“I have no idea if you’re around, or if you’re listening, but…” she paused, letting out a soft breath.

Firm but polite, the website had said. Stern, but not mean. _The fact that they are dead might already be traumatizing to the ghost_. That much did at least seem true, based on how bothered he had been by facing the reality of no longer being the owner of his home.

“I know that this is your home, and I’m sorry for whatever happened to you,” she said. Apologizing to ghosts, after all, felt like a good first step. Friendly. “But you can’t stay here.”

Silence.

“I can’t have you living here, and I absolutely cannot deal with what happens if you scare my friends,” she said. “So please, go.”

She fell silent, looking around the room. There was no answer, and nothing changed in the room. But, anticlimactic though it may have been, perhaps that was a good sign. Nodding to herself, she returned downstairs, content to believe that she was done with the ghost.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello hello come see me on tumblr (kylocrystal) or twitter (@becksolo)


	4. Chapter Four

Things did not end with her asking the ghost to leave, though she knew that it would have been optimistic to hope that they would. After all, there was no suggestion that he was actually listening or even present when she asked him to leave, and he had already outright told her that he couldn’t.

It felt for a little while like it might have worked. There were no odd sounds that couldn’t be explained away, no sudden unnerving chills, and perhaps most importantly, no strange men showing up in her apartment. Occasionally, she would think that she saw something out of the corner of her eye, but then she would turn her head to find that there was nothing actually there, or there was a jacket or something that she had laid down somewhere she usually didn’t.

Things were quiet. So very, very quiet. Rey wasn’t sure that she had ever encountered such quiet, even with the sounds of Beebee wandering about. It was peaceful, maybe, or it would have been if she was the sort of person who craved quiet. She had grown far too accustomed to a certain level of chaos as the norm.

But all good things – was this a good thing? – had to come to an end, and just as she was finally settling into the routine of actually living on her own, the world began to tilt off of its axis once more.

The most natural thing in Rey’s life was baking. And while there was a nice and familiar reliability to making recipes that she could eyeball the ingredients in, there was something to be said for recipes that called for a great attention to detail. Once upon a time she had thought she would go into a STEM field, after all, and she’d never lost that appreciation for precision. French macarons were one such recipe – making them called for patience and her trusty digital kitchen scale.

She was in the middle of pulsing the dry ingredient mixture in the food processor – a step she often considered skipping and would debate the merits of every single time she made macarons – when she heard a voice behind her.

At first, she wasn’t completely sure that she had heard anything at all, with the noise of the food processor cacophonous in the quiet kitchen, making it easy for her mind to invent sounds that weren’t there. But then, as she pulled her finger off of the pulse button and the room grew quiet again, the voice returned.

“What the hell is all that noise about?”

She was grateful that she wasn’t holding anything at that moment because she certainly would have dropped it, jumping and whipping around on her feet to face where the voice had come from.

Just as she had known she would find, the man, the _ghost_ is back, standing in her kitchen and looking every bit as real and alive as any of her friends would if they had come by to see her. When she focused on him – _staring, Rey, you’re staring_ – she could tell that he wasn’t quite as solid as he initially appeared, but he still looked startlingly real.

“What are you talking about?” she asked even though it was obvious what he was referring to, needing to have a moment to compose herself a bit more.

“That,” he said, gesturing over to the small appliance sitting on the counter.

“I’m making macarons,” she said, as if that explained everything. Which, to be fair, in her eyes it really sort of did explain everything.

“Why don’t you just turn it on and leave it on?”

When Rey glanced up at him, she wasn’t entirely sure whether he was asking purely out of irritation or if he was also genuinely curious about the process, but either way she was going to choose to take the question at face value.

Baking had become her life, and she wasn’t going to miss an opportunity to talk about it.

“Well, to be honest, I could,” she told him with a small shrug, looking down at the powder in the food processor for a moment. “Usually, I just pulse on the food processor to stop from _over_ -processing, but for macarons, you want it super fine, so there is no such thing as too much processing. So I could leave it on, but it’s just habit.”

The ghost didn’t say anything right off the bat, just watching her as she did a couple more pulses on the food processor. She tapped the side to resettle the powder, then turned the appliance back on for a moment.

“I don’t know much about macarons,” he said finally. The way he said the word was a little bit unsure, like he perhaps wanted to say “macaroons” instead.

“Well, they’re not really as hard to make as everyone says they are. It just requires patience,” she told him.

“To be fair, I don’t actually know… well, _anything_ about baking. Just, in general,” he said. “I’ve noticed that you do a lot of it.”

Rey nodded. “I do. I run a bakery. Though what I do at home is just for me and my friends’ enjoyment. Or experiments for the bakery,” she said. She moved over to where her stand mixer was waiting for her, pouring egg whites in and starting it.

“Ah. I see,” he said, nodding slowly.

It struck her as a little bit odd, in that moment, that this didn’t feel half as strange as it should have. After all, this man was a complete and utter mystery to her, and she absolutely should not have felt comfortable with his presence. It should have been upsetting that he hadn’t left when she had asked him to; though, in the back of her mind, she knew that he was never going to have left. He _couldn’t_ leave, if his words to be trusted, though she couldn’t be certain that was the case either.

The bottom line was this: she shouldn’t be calmly having a conversation with what could only be described as some sort of paranormal being.

But, at least she could do _something_ to make this a little bit less strange.

“What’s your name?” she asked him, briefly turning off the mixer as she turned to face him properly.

The silence that it left in the room where he _should_ have been answering was deafening. Briefly, she thought that he just wasn’t going to give her an answer.

“Kylo,” he said eventually. “Kylo Ren.”

Right off the top, that struck her as something that couldn’t be a real name. Kyle, sure. She’d met women named Kylie, too, of course, and she was pretty sure that Kyla was a name, but Kylo was… a step beyond that, at least. But she could be polite when she needed to be, so she held her tongue. “Kylo,” she said. But then, because she’d never been _too_ good at holding back her impulses, “That’s a unique name.”

“It is,” he said.

“You’re a man of many words.” She made a mental note to look up the name on Google later; maybe something about a brutal murder would show up and then at least she would _know_.

“I don’t know what to say,” he replied with a small shrug of his broad shoulders. “Some might say that it would be polite for you to introduce yourself now in return.”

Rey blinked, realizing that she had not, in fact, told him what her name was. “Rey,” she said.

“That isn’t exactly a particularly common name either,” he pointed out.

A soft laugh escaped her lips, and she nodded, not saying anything for a moment as he turned the mixer back on, watching the whisk move in rapid circles through the bowl. “No, I guess not,” she said. “But it’s no Kylo.”

“True. You just have no place to judge,” he responded. He moved a bit closer to her, and she felt a little bit of a chill run through her. It was almost startling, given that if he had been living, she was sure that he would be close enough for her to feel his body heat. Though her friends were affectionate, she had never quite gotten used to casual

For a split second she wasn’t sure if he was going to end up trying something, but it appeared that he was simply interested in looking at what she was doing. And in any case, the image of his hand seeming to go right through Beebee’s body suggested that he wasn’t present enough to be able to actually do anything to her.

“Who said I was judging?” she asked.

She took advantage of the opportunity to turn her head and look at him properly. In this close proximity, a few things stood out to her. For one, from this distance it was easier to notice again that he wasn’t quite as _real_ as other people were; the edges of his body seemed almost hazy, and if she focused she could see through him like seeing through a sheet – mostly just shapes, but it was still something.

But, perhaps more important than establishing once more that yes, this was not just a strange human man in her apartment, she noticed that he was… Well, she wasn’t sure how to describe him. She was pretty sure that none of her friends would consider him properly attractive, but he had a handsomeness to him that she couldn’t figure out. His lips were full and they looked like they would have been soft if she could touch them, and she was strangely transfixed by the little freckles and moles on his face.

She lifted her hand, just briefly, itching to just try and touch him, but she snapped herself out of it just as quickly.

Kylo was looking at her now, and she realized that he had to have said something to her. But after a couple more seconds passed and neither of them said anything, he returned his gaze to the mixer, asking, “What’s going on here?”

“Macarons are meringue cookies, essentially, so I’m beating egg whites and sugar,” she said.

He nodded slowly, looking down into the metal bowl with an understanding hum. “It looks like marshmallow,” he said.

“Yeah, I can see that,” she said. She stopped the mixer for a moment, lifting the top before putting it back down and starting it again.

“So, how do you know when it’s, uh, ready?”

Rey hummed softly, pleased that he genuinely did seem curious about what she was doing. “Stiff peaks,” she said. “When I can pull the whisk back and it’ll stand up on its own without collapsing, it’s ready.”

It wasn’t too long before the meringue was doing exactly what it was supposed to do – she had gotten better over time at knowing the timing of it just by feel, but she had never really enjoyed working with meringue – and she was able to fold the dry ingredients into the bowl. Glancing up at him, there was something far too cute about the way that he was watching her with earnest interest.

It was nice, really, having someone new to talk to about the processes behind baking, to give him tips that he might not ever use – half the mix at a time, use the tip of the spatula – but he seemed willing enough to listen.

“And now comes the fun part,” she said, turning around to find where she had her piping bags stowed away. “It’s kind of an art, so – Kylo?”

When she turned back around to face him, she found that she was alone in the kitchen. There was no evidence that there had even been anyone else there, and she wasn’t sure when the last time she had felt such sore loneliness was. She turned her focus instead to piping; baking had been her constant companion, and it wouldn’t let her down now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay, from here on out, i'm going to make a real effort to actually respond to comments. i'm very bad about remembering to reply.
> 
> @becksolo on twitter, come watch me yell about how i'm going to celebration anaheim 2020


	5. Chapter Five

A few days passed where things were mostly quiet at home. She spent a bit more time at the bakery out of necessity, though a little voice in the back of Rey’s head was begging at her to go home and seek out Kylo again.

But that would have been excessive and unnecessary, especially for someone that she wasn’t even friends with. He lived in her home, as a ghost, and one positive interaction where he had mysteriously disappeared did not a friendship make.

That did not mean, however, that she couldn’t be curious.

So that curiosity led to her typing his name into Google. She was a little bit concerned that it might have some strange spelling to go with how unique the name was, but she was surprised to find that her first attempt at spelling it showed up several results.

Most of the results are related to a company called First Order Enterprises.

When she clicks on the website for the company, she finds that the design of it is sleek and modern, the kind of webpage that would be a nightmare to try to load on her cellphone, with all kinds of images that appear as she scrolls and menus that appear only when she hovers over them. Still, it speaks to a level of opulence she’s never really been around.

(Rey, for her part, is pretty okay with computers. When the realization hit her that the bakery would benefit from having an online presence, she took it upon herself to learn enough about building a website and HTML to get one set up, along with the appropriate levels of social media promotion. It required her to learn how to use Instagram, which was never something she had thought she would have to do.)

It is vague and confusing, looking at the website, as to what exactly First Order did. She supposed that it was because she had never really been savvy to the whole big corporate business thing – she really only worried about business as far as it was relevant to keeping her own afloat. Suits were restrictive, and a nine to five office job always felt like they would have suffocated her. Regardless, the website was covered with buzzwords – efficiency, synergy, and the like – which ultimately told her nothing real.

Whatever it was that the company Kylo worked for did, she could tell that there was money in it. It was also the sort of company that, apparently, had a number of fancy events where everyone in the organization apparently dressed to the nines and ate hors d’oeuvres.

As she navigated to another of the search results, she found a handful of pictures of Kylo. He was always well-put together, in sharp outfits of fitted suits and shiny cufflinks.

He was handsome, in a way. There was never a smile on his lips and in all of the pictures he looked just the slightest bit angry, which made him seem a little bit intimidating, but she had seen this man talking to her cat. She wasn’t going to be intimidated by him.

There was a man beside him in some of the pictures, and whereas she wasn’t allowing herself to be bothered by the image that Kylo seemed to be trying to project, there was something unsettling about the man he appeared to work for. Snoke, according to a caption on one of the photos, was the president of First Order Enterprises, and there was something in his face that immediately put Rey on edge, even just looking at a picture of him.

Other pictures featured a redhaired man with a seemingly permanent sour look on his face and a blond woman who was strikingly tall and every bit as intimidating as Kylo himself.

“What are you looking at?”

The voice coming from behind her, while not entirely unexpected, still surprised Rey and made her jump a little bit, having to flail to keep herself from throwing her laptop across the room.

“Goddammit, where did you come from?” she asked, though she had a feeling that Kylo didn’t know the answer to that question any better than she did.

“Upstairs,” he said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the stairs, as if possibly all of this was normal and he was just her roommate, coming silently down from his bedroom to see what she was up to. “Sorry I missed the rest of your baking lesson the other day.”

“It’s alright,” she said. A little smirk crossing her lips, she added, “Though, if you were really that bored, you could have just told me.”

“I’ll keep that in mind for next time,” he said, though Rey was pretty sure that he hadn’t been in control of his disappearance, and both of them knew it. He leaned forward over the back of the couch, peeking over her shoulder at what was on her computer screen, and making a surprised sound at the sight of his own image staring back at him.

She felt a little bit ashamed for just a moment, as if she was invading his privacy by looking up his life on the internet, but the fact was that he was kind of invading her privacy, whether he intended to or not – her home was not exclusively her own. “I’m just…” she started, shrugging as she looked back at the computer.

“You’re curious,” he said. “I suppose I can’t blame you for that.”

Rey nodded slowly, looking between the picture on the screen and the man standing beside her, almost as solid as if he were living and breathing, though the goosebumps on her arms told her otherwise. He wasn’t wearing a suit now, instead in jeans and a tshirt, much more casual and far less imposing.

“I am,” she agreed. “I wanted to know more about you.”

“Find out anything good?”

“Not a whole lot, admittedly,” she said with a little shrug, leaning back against the couch cushions. “It… I didn’t even find a Facebook account for you.”

A dry laugh fell from Kylo’s lips, and he nodded. “Sorry,” he said. He moved around the couch and reached a hand out toward the cushion next to the one she was sitting on. When his hand actually landed solidly on the cushion instead of passing through it, he made a soft satisfied sound as he turned around to sit down beside her. “It’s hard knowing what I can and cannot touch,” he explained.

It was… strangely endearing, seeing this large man having to question his own ability to sit down on a couch. The fact that he had invited himself to sit down was a bit familiar, but she supposed they were beyond having to worry about what was “too” familiar at this point.

“Do you not have a Facebook?” she asked.

“I do not,” he confirmed, looking down at the computer for a moment. “I never really got the point, and having an account would have made me too easy to find.”

The words struck her as being a bit paranoid maybe, but she didn’t comment on it, just raising an eyebrow slightly. “Which is why you work for a company that seems pretty high profile.”

“I didn’t really know that it would be like that,” he told her with a shrug. “But in any case, I’m not that worried about it. People are only going to find me via my association to First Order if they know what they’re looking for.”

Again, a big part of Rey wanted to ask him what he meant by all that, but she held herself back from it because she didn’t want to push him too much. If he was the sort of person who was private enough to not have a Facebook page due to a desire to not be found, he was probably also the sort of person who wouldn’t appreciate having to answer invasive personal questions.

A moment passed in silence where it almost looked like Kylo was searching for words, before he finally cleared his throat. “Did you find anything about how I died?”

Well. She wasn’t expecting that question, though in hindsight she realized she should have been expecting it. And really, if Kylo was some sort of big shot at a big company, then maybe there _should_ have been coverage she could find about his death. She hadn’t done too much looking, but she would have anticipated anything about his death to come up relatively high on the results if it was something recent.

Rey lifted her head to regard him for a moment. He looked a little bit lost, and she wished that she could give him more of an answer than she had right now. “So, you still don’t remember anything about how you died?”

“Not a thing,” he said, shaking his head. He frowned for a moment, his brow furrowing, suggesting that he was trying hard to think about it, but after a few seconds he just sighed and let himself lean back against the back of the couch again. “I don’t even remember being in any sort of situations where I might be in danger, or anything like that.”

Nodding slowly, she let out a sigh. “Right. I mean, maybe you just… died in a non-typical way?” she suggested.

“I mean, I suppose I could have had a heart attack and keeled over in my office,” he said, rolling his eyes at the thought. “I definitely had enough stress that I was dealing with to make that one at least sound kind of plausible.”

“What did you do?” she asked; it was wandering off the topic of his death, which was probably for the best, and she was curious anyway.

“Technically, when I was hired, I was supposed to be an in-house lawyer,” he explained. “Contracts, avoiding our asses getting sued. that sort of thing. But Snoke took a liking to me, so I ended up starting just doing… Well, whatever odd jobs he needed to get done that he didn’t trust anyone else with. I learned a lot from it, I suppose, but it was definitely draining.”

Nodding slowly, she hummed in acknowledgement. “That does sound like a lot,” she said, though at the same time it didn’t actually tell her much beyond getting the idea that he was, in fact, pretty important and busy.

“It was. I mean, it was good, it filled my time,” he explained, shrugging. He didn’t say anything for a second, then gestured to her laptop. “You have Google up still, see if you can find anything about how I died.”

Rey looked back at her computer, hesitating for just a moment. For now, they were in a kind of nice in between state – sure, he was dead, that much had to be true, but if they didn’t know anything about his death… Well, it was almost like it wasn’t real. Right now, he felt like he was just some sort of friend sitting on her couch, hanging out with her.

“What if it turns out that you died in some horrific way, and your mind is trying to save you from having to remember it?” she asked. “Like on The Good Place. Maybe you got hit by a falling statue of your boss, or an A/C unit.”

Kylo looked at her for a moment with a slight frown, looking a little bit baffled by the reference, but moved on after a moment. “If I’m scarred by my own demise, then so be it. I’ve got to know.”

“Okay,” she said with a soft sigh, because really, how was it her place to tell him whether or not he was allowed to know what his ultimate fate on this planet was?

She looked down at the computer and opened up a new tab to Google, staring at it for a second before starting to type.

_‘kylo ren death’_

She braced herself as she hit enter, but the results came up with nothing relevant. Just a couple of random pages about the metaphorical death of parts of the economy, and that sort of thing. “Huh.”

_‘how did kylo ren die’_

Nothing.

_‘kylo ren obituary’_

Nada.

_‘is kylo ren dead 2019’_

She didn’t expect to get a real answer from Google on that, since most people who weren’t celebrities wouldn’t get many results from that search, but she was willing to try anything.

“Well,” he said, leaning back and looking away from the computer. “That’s disappointing.”

“It is,” she said slowly, frowning. “I would have thought there’d be _something_. Like, at least an obituary. Maybe I can look up someone close to you? See if there’s anything anyone has posted on Facebook or anything.”

Kylo lifted a hand and waved off her words. “It’s not that important, Nancy Drew, you don’t have to do any digging,” he said. “I was just curious.”

“But what if I do want to do digging?” she asked. “It seems really strange that there isn’t anything at all.”

“I doubt you’re going to find anything if there isn’t anything on the internet about it. The internet knows everything,” he argued.

She knew that she ought to stop herself before her mind could start running away from her too much, but she couldn’t help it. She was curious now, more than she was before, and sometimes when you were dealing with the impossible, unlikely things happened. Which was why she found herself asking, “What if someone is trying to cover it up?”

Kylo looked at her like she was crazy for a moment, then nodded. “I mean, I guess anything is possible.”

“Then the question becomes this… Who do you think is suspicious in your life?”

“Who isn’t?” he said, his tone light though there was something in the look on his face that told her there was a little bit more to it than that.

“Give me somewhere to start, at least,” she suggested. “Your boss, maybe? If he _literally_ worked you to death, that seems like something he would want to hide.”

“No,” he said immediately. “I don’t want you to go after Snoke.”

“Alright,” she said, though she couldn’t deny she was keeping the idea in the back of her mind. “Who, then?”

He still looked reluctant, like maybe he was starting to think that all of this was a terrible idea and he never should have asked her about his death at all, but eventually he said, “Armitage Hux. Hux might know something.”

Rey hummed and wrote down the name. Armitage Hux. It was a start.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @becksolo on twitter, come say hi!
> 
> also does anyone know anything about moodboards, i think i want to do a moodboard


	6. Chapter Six

“So, tell me everything you can think of about Hux,” Rey prompted as she and Kylo sat together on her couch. Her knees were pulled up close against her chest as she had herself angled to face him head on. It had been a while since she’d had real excitement in her life, and the thought of potentially investigating an actual murder (or otherwise suspicious death) definitely qualified as excitement.

Unfortunately, it turned out that the answer to the question of what Kylo knew about Hux was that he knew very little.

“He was essentially my equal within the company, before Snoke decided to start giving me extra responsibilities,” Kylo had explained. “Obviously he didn’t take that too well.”

“So he was jealous?”

“I guess,” he’d responded with a shrug, running his hand up through his hair as he thought about it. “He started trying to find ways to show me up.”

Kylo had also admitted that he didn’t really have any expectation that Hux was the type to murder someone or orchestrate their death, but given the circumstances, he _probably_ was the most likely culprit. Rey had pressed him on it, asking him if there was anyone at all else in his life that might have something to gain from him going missing, but he had said no.

There was something that struck her as incredibly sad about it all, though she decided against commenting on it. She had the distinct impression that Kylo was a lonely person. There was no one on the internet that seemed to be looking for him or posting about missing him at all, and he hadn’t asked about anyone or tried to get her to communicate with someone on his behalf; if Rey were to die and come back as a ghost, her first thought absolutely would be to have someone get her in touch with Finn in some way. But Kylo was… different. He seemed alone.

So she accepted it and agreed that yes, it did seem a little bit strange and extreme that someone would kill someone else to gain more favor in their employer’s eyes.

But stranger things had surely happened, and it was her only lead, so she needed to follow it.

Kylo didn’t know much about Hux’s personal life, since they had certainly never spent any time together outside of the office that wasn’t required of them. As far as he knew, he said, Hux lived alone and was unmarried; his desk was plainly decorated and nothing about it betrayed much of anything personal.

“What’s his favorite baked good?” she had asked.

Not saying anything for a moment, Kylo gave her a look that was mildly exasperated while also being amused, and he shook his head. “I don’t know that.”

“Shame,” she said.

Which brought her to where she was now: in her kitchen, putting together a basket of baked goods for Hux. It wasn’t exactly the greatest of plans, but it was what she had. After all, who didn’t like baked goods?

Chocolate chip cookies were a classic, and no one could possibly not like them, though she had a little bit of a tough time deciding whether or not to include nuts; she decided against it in the end, of course, since plenty of people had allergies and she didn’t want it to seem like she was making an attempt on his life. Hux was Irish, Kylo had mentioned, so she had tried to figure out if there were any pastries or cookies that were commonly made in Ireland; she came up a bit short on that, but that was alright. She was able to throw together a couple more things that felt neutral enough that just about anyone could enjoy them, even someone “joyless” as Kylo described him.

“Tell me again what you hope you’re going to achieve by doing this,” Kylo commented from where he was sprawled out on her couch, looking over at her as she arranged the treats neatly in a basket.

He seemed to be enjoying his newfound ability to actually sit on furniture and he was taking full advantage of it, going so far as to go through the motions of taking a nap, though he had explained that he definitely didn’t get tired anymore and when he did try to sleep, that was generally when he felt himself disappearing again so it was a fool’s errand.

Since he had reappeared when she started her Google research on him, he had seemed to have become Rey’s constant companion. Sure, he still disappeared here and there seemingly at random, but he was still around much of the time and they were having pleasant conversation. Most of it was just small talk, neither of them seemingly willing to cross the boundary over into getting too personal, but it was pleasant.

If Rey had been worried about being lonely in her new home, well, she didn’t need to worry about that anymore. She certainly hadn’t been expecting this in the slightest, but she could be dealing with much worse.

“What I’m hoping to achieve,” Rey said, turning to face him properly, “is getting face to face with him. If I deliver this basket to his office – saying that someone ordered them for him, of course – then I’ll get to talk to him.”

“And he’s going to talk to the cookie delivery girl why?”

Huffing, she shook her head. “He might, he might not. But I can at least get a feel for him,” she said. She had gone over this a few times with him already and he remained incredibly skeptical, though she couldn’t exactly blame him for it. It wasn’t much of a plan, but she couldn’t do much without seeming incredibly suspicious.

“At this point, you really might as well just do nothing,” he said with a shrug. “It’s not like finding out he slipped poison into my coffee is going to bring me back to life.”

“ _But_ ,” she protested. “Ghosts often hang around because there’s, like… unfinished business with them. Maybe your soul is still hanging around down on Earth because you need to be avenged.”

Kylo actually laughed out loud at that. He didn’t laugh much (or smile either), Rey had noticed, and it felt like an achievement, even if he did happen to be laughing _at_ her. “Avenged,” he echoed. “What kind of vengeance are you bringing?”

“Listen, I may not look like much, but baking actually gives you pretty impressive muscles,” she informed him, lifting one of her arms and flexing to demonstrate. She did also regularly hit the gym, but that was neither here nor there.

“I think that it may actually be easier for you to just… I don’t know, poison him with your baking,” he pointed out.

Laughing, she scoffed at his suggestion, shaking her head. “No, that would be just far too boring and predictable. Besides, if the police get involved – which they should, at the point that two people in your company have died under mysterious circumstances – it would be way too easy to track down to me.”

“Why do I get the distinct feeling that you’ve considered murdering someone before?” he asked, and there’s a look on his face that she can almost describe as playful. It’s attractive.

Rey lifted her hand and made a waving motion to dismiss his words. “Not in realistic terms, but it’s something that everyone has at least considered, right? Like, okay, if I were to get away with murder, how would I do it?”

“So, you can promise me that there is _not_ poison in anything in that basket you’ve got there?”

Rolling her eyes, she nodded. “It’s one hundred percent poison-free,” she confirmed. “He might have nothing to do with your death, after all.”

“It doesn’t have to be poison-free,” Kylo offered. “Even if he doesn’t have anything to do with it, he’s still an absolute tool.”

“I can’t murder someone for being a _tool_ ,” she protested.

He huffed and shook his head in disapproval. “Fine, then. I didn’t realize you were boring.”

“Oh, stuff it,” she said, walking over to join him on the couch and shooing him over to sit up on one side of it; she knew that it didn’t matter, that she could just sit down _through_ him and it would make no difference, but she tried not to make real contact with him. There was something unsettling about it.

She grabbed the TV remote and put on a movie (a romcom, because she had the distinct feeling that Kylo would complain about it. Much to her surprise, he sat in silence and seemed to even enjoy the movie, though he commented on the foolishness of the main characters more than once), and it didn’t take long before Beebee was up on the couch between them, and everything felt bizarrely right.

* * *

 

As much as Rey would deny it if she was asked about it, overnight she had gotten herself a little bit spooked by the thought of going into Hux’s office.

She knew that it wasn’t rational in the slightest, considering the fact that no sane person would bring any harm to what seemed to be a random delivery person, even if Hux had, in fact, murdered Kylo in cold blood.

Still, walking into the lobby of the First Order Enterprises building, she had to give herself a moment to steel herself and calm her nerves before she headed up. She had been worried about getting access to the building, but wearing a polo with the bakery’s logo and holding a gift basket, it appeared that no one really batted a lash at her presence, simply informing her where she would find Hux’s office and sending her up.

She knocked when she approached his door, and was answered with a stiff, “Enter.”

Even though she had seen pictures of the man online, she was still a little bit caught off guard by seeing Armitage Hux in the flesh. He had bright hair that had been carefully arranged on top of his head, and the expression on his face was tight and a little bit angry, seemingly even in its resting state. Something about him seemed to suck the air out of the room.

When the man looked up from his computer screen towards her, she felt locked in place by his gaze. “Can I help you?” Though his words were polite, there was something in his tone that implied that she was wasting his time.

“I have a delivery for you,” she told him.

Hux raised an eyebrow but rose from his seat, gesturing her over. He took the basket and set it on his desk, looking down at it with a small frown on his lips as he examined it. “Is there a card?”

Shaking her head, Rey folded her arms behind her back to keep herself standing still. “The sender requested that this be an anonymous gift.”

“How convenient,” he commented flatly, shaking his head. “Come on, then. Tell me who sent this.”

“I can’t do that, sir.”

He reached back, pulling his wallet from his pocket and unfolding it. “You work for tips, don’t you?” he said.

Rey wasn’t really here to make a good tip, and the whole thing was a little bit funny when she considered the amount of work she was going to for absolutely no monetary reward. But a thought occurred to her, and she had to run with it. “Okay, okay,” she said, making her voice sound just a little bit nervous, like she was doing something she knew she ought not to. “The order came from a Kylo Ren?”

Snapping his head up and suddenly looking much more interested in what she had to say, Hux nearly dropped his wallet entirely. “Kylo Ren sent this?” he asked. “You’re certain of that?”

“Yes.”

“And when was this order placed?”

“Yesterday, Mr. Hux.”

Hux didn’t say anything for a moment, taking a few steps before stopping and turning on his heel, pacing a little bit as he seemed to be turning this new information over in his head. “What does he think he’s playing at?” he mumbled. Looking back at Rey, he asked, “Did you see him? Was the order made in person?”

“It was,” she said, nodding.

“And what did he look like?”

“He was… tall,” she said, lifting her hand up to approximate how tall he was. “Large – not, I mean, he wasn’t fat, he’s just a big man. He had dark hair, and a very –“

“Alright, enough,” he said, waving his hand to stop her. “Thank you.”

She knew that she shouldn’t press him on it, but she couldn’t help herself. If this man knew something and she didn’t try to find out what that was, then she would be letting Kylo down. “Is there something wrong?”

Hux seemed to consider her for a moment, before leaning over and producing a business card. He handed it to her, then pulled out a hundred dollar bill from his wallet that she had to hesitate before taking. “If you happen to see Ren again, you’ll call me at this number, immediately,” he said. “It’s my direct line.”

“I was given the impression that Mr. Ren worked in this building,” she said. It felt strange to call Kylo “Mr. Ren,” but she felt like calling him by his first name would come across as too familiar.

“He _did_ , until he pulled a disappearing act,” he said, rolling his eyes.

Rey raised an eyebrow at that. “Disappearing act?”

“One day he was here as normal, and the next he was gone. Not a word,” he said.

“That’s strange.”

“Very,” he agreed with a small nod, rolling his eyes. “And now he’s playing some sort of game with us. When Snoke finds out…” He trailed off, then gestured her over toward the door. “Now go, girl.”

Rey hesitated for just a second before leaving the office with a quick, “Have a good day.”

* * *

 

When Rey got back to her townhouse that evening after closing up the bakery, she was eager to share everything about her encounter with Hux and speculate about it with Kylo.

“Kylo!” she called out, walking around the first floor. When Beebee approached her with a curious meow, she scooped him up in her arms and headed up the stairs, though she already had a feeling that she wouldn’t find Kylo up there. Generally Beebee could be found lingering near the ghost; it was hard to tell at times whether he was fond of Kylo and still seeking out affection from him or if he was suspicious and feeling like he needed to be a guard cat.

“I’m getting tired of this, Kylo,” she grumbled as she walked into her bedroom, dropping herself down onto the bed. Beebee trilled at her and walked up her body to settle next to her head, purring. She had no idea if Kylo could hear her, but she was willing to speak to him as if he was there always. “But, you know, take your time, I _guess_. If you have to.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i actually briefly considered having hux take interest in rey and ask her out ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> @becksolo on twitter, say hello


	7. Seven

Kylo showed back up the next day while she was making herself lunch on her day off. She got him up to speed on how the meeting with Hux had gone as she finished up making her breakfast, and when she sat down to eat, he sat across the table from her to carry on the conversation.

“I kind of feel like a jerk sitting here with a plate of food in front of me while you sit there with nothing, even though I _know_ you can’t eat,” she commented.

“Don’t worry about it. I’m just grateful to be able to smell it, if we’re being honest,” he said, waving off her words. “I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that you decided to tell him that _I_ sent him a bunch of cookies.”

“He probably thought they were poisoned after all,” Rey said with a little laugh.

“Probably,” he admitted. “I mean, it does sound like something I would do.” He paused for a moment, staring off into space, and Rey was almost going to make a joke about him fantasizing about murdering Hux, before he said, “So he really did seem to have no idea where I had gone?”

“Not at all,” she said. “I mean, maybe he’s just a good actor, but… I didn’t get that impression.”

It did complicate things, definitely. It meant that they essentially had nothing to go off of anymore, barring finding out something from Snoke, which Kylo had specifically told her multiple times by now she was _not_ allowed to do. She was curious about it, but she also didn’t take too much issue with being told no under these circumstances.

Which is why, truth be told, it caught her a little bit off guard when he just seemed to shrug it off. “Well, I guess that’s that, then,” he said.

Frowning, Rey watched him for a moment curiously. “That’s it?” she asked.

“I mean, what else is there, really?” he said, and she genuinely couldn’t tell whether there was any bitterness in his voice or not.

“You don’t want to find out how you died?”

Kylo shrugged. “I don’t want you going on a wild goose chase trying to figure it out,” he said. “And as you pointed out, knowing might be worse. If it was traumatic, I’m probably better off not knowing.”

“I guess,” she admitted. She watched him for a little bit longer before she let it go, turning her attention back to the plate in front of her and eating her lunch. “My friends are coming over this evening.”

“Your friends,” he echoed slowly, and for the briefest of moments Rey was concerned that she was going to have to explain the concept of friendship to him. “They’ve been here before.”

“They have,” she agreed. Pausing for a moment, she tilted her head as she thought back. “You’ve never really been around while they have.”

“I haven’t,” he said. “I mean… I’ve been aware of them, in a way, but whenever they’ve been around, it’s been at times when I’ve been kind of… foggy.”

Rey was still incredibly curious about what it all meant, why he would have times when he was around for long stretches of time and how he would disappear and come back but never actually seem to have _been_ anywhere. But she knew that all the answers that she was seeking out were nothing that he had to be able to give her. Asking would probably just prove frightening.

“But you do know of them, at least. That’s good,” she said. Frowning, she continued, “You don’t suppose it’s, like, one of them is… Their energy isn’t conducive to spirits?”

After a couple of seconds of silence, Kylo burst out into a laugh. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about how you’re a ghost, and the internet suggests that ghosts are governed by weird rules.”

“Okay, first off, I’ve never given a damn about a single rule,” he protested. “And I don’t know if the internet is a reliable source on this one.”

Rey shrugged, knowing fully well that he was probably right and there was most likely just about nothing on the internet that she could trust. Sure, there probably were people online who had had actual encounters with ghosts much like she had, but those anecdotes would probably not be helpful, and it would be damn near impossible to separate them out from the hoaxes. “But still,” she said. “It doesn’t seem totally unreasonable that a person could have a… an energy, or an aura that is… ghost unfriendly.”

“Maybe,” he said. “I’m on a pretty good run of feeling like I’m fully _here_ lately, so I’ll see if I can’t hold on for this evening.”

“Good. Then we can see. Because Finn was pretty spooked when I moved in here and he thought it might be haunted,” she said.

Raising an eyebrow at her, he asked, “You thought this place was haunted?”

“He did, I wasn’t particularly convinced,” she told him. “There was something kind of spooky about it, I will grant that.”

“And now you know what the something spooky is,” he said, looking a little bit too pleased with himself for it.

Rey shook her head at him as if in disapproval, but she couldn’t help the smile that crept across her lips. “You’re hardly spooky at all, Kylo Ren.”

“I think that I _have_ spooked you though.”

Thinking back, she hummed thoughtfully, saying, “True, there really isn’t anything more scary than someone trying and utterly failing to pet my cat.”

“The damn thing wouldn’t leave me alone,” Kylo pointed out, shaking his head. “He was following me around and meowing.”

“Because he’s a cat,” she said, shaking her head at the fact that Kylo genuinely did seem a little bit dismayed by the attention that he received from Beebee. She rose back up onto her feet and took her plate over to the sink to rinse it. “Anyway, the point here is, just… Don’t disappear. And maybe you’ll get to meet my friends.”

“Would they want to meet me?” he asked.

Rey had to stop and think about it. Rose, absolutely, would be tickled by the idea that ghosts were real and that Rey was, in fact, living with one. Finn would probably be just as scared as ever, and Poe… well, she wasn’t sure about Poe. He kept a cool exterior, but she knew that he had his moments. “Well, I’m not sure,” she admitted. “I think that once Finn got over the shock and fear of it all, he might feel kind of vindicated.”

“That’s something,” he said.

She paused in what she was doing, turning back to him for a moment. “You think so?”

“They might not be able to see me,” he pointed out. “You’ve always been more… I don’t know, aware of me, I suppose.”

“I guess,” she said. “Though, that’s definitely the sort of thing that happens in movies, so now _you’re_ the one who is acting weirdly superstitious.”

“Maybe,” he admitted as he got to his feet, heading into the living room and letting himself drop down onto the armchair.

Watching him, Rey crossed over to the closet near the front door which held her cleaning supplies (she knew that her friends wouldn’t mind, but it still felt to her like she should at least make a bit of an effort, and in any case, she genuinely did _enjoy_ cleaning). She felt most of the time now like she was getting pretty good at reading him – he had such an expressive face – but even at best, she hadn’t really seen him in many social situations. “If you don’t _want_ to meet them, you know, that’s also okay,” she said.

Kylo looked at her for a moment with a small frown, shaking his head. “It isn’t that, not quite,” he said. He appeared to be struggling for words for a moment, before eventually he said, “I’m just not… good with people.”

“You’re good with me,” she pointed out.

“That’s different,” he said, dismissing her words with a wave of his hand.

“How so?”

“You’re… you,” he said, and he looked like he was having trouble with himself again, so she held herself back from asking him to clarify further.

“Well, we’ll see, okay?” she said, giving him a small smile. “You don’t have to meet them at all, whether they can see you or not.”

He seemed to relax a little bit when she said that, though he hadn’t even noticed that he was tense, and it felt good to know that she seemed to have pieced together this much of the puzzle that was Kylo Ren. Now she just needed to figure out why it was that he was so nervous about people, but that was surely a problem for another time.

Much of the afternoon was spent tidying up around the apartment and making the occasional joke about how Kylo ought to pull his weight around the house, to which he would consistently just roll his eyes at her. Even though the entire routine of cleaning was unchanged from before she had had his company, there was something nice about not having to do it _alone_. She held herself back from voicing that thought, but she hoped that Kylo could tell that she was happy to have him around nonetheless.

And even though he hadn’t seemed all too sold on the idea of meeting her friends, he could hope that he would change his mind. Or at the very least, that if he was able to interact with them, that he would play nice. He was becoming an increasingly important figure in her life, and she wasn’t sure what she would do if she had to permanently keep these two parts of her life separate.

All of those thoughts were wiped from her mind when the time came around for her friends to arrive.

Kylo was still lingering on the couch, and he lifted his head when he heard the knock at the door. “Guess it’s showtime,” he said.

“Guess so,” she said with a little laugh. She went to answer the door, stopping for a moment and looking back at him as if to give him another chance to bolt if he wanted to, but he wasn’t getting up, so she turned back around and opened the door.

“The party’s here!” Poe announced as he walked through the door, a six pack of beer in each hand. Finn was walking in behind him, a bag that she recognized as being takeout from their go-to Chinese restaurant carefully cradled in his arm.

“How does that beer go with that food?” she asked, a little smile on her lips, Kylo forgotten for just the moment.

“Probably not well,” Rose chimed in brightly. “But we’re no connoisseurs.”

“We can’t all be masters of the art of… tasting, and matching flavors,” Poe added.

Rey laughed and rolled her eyes at them fondly. “I would hardly call myself a _master_ ,” she said. “And it’s really only with baking. I don’t – I mean, I’m no master chef.”

“You could still be on one of those Food Network competition shows, though,” Finn said.

She huffed and shook her head, shepherding the three of them into the house and shutting the door behind them. She turned back around to watch as they moved through the living area; they’d have to walk right past Kylo, there was no possible way that they wouldn’t see him.

But Poe and Finn breezed right past the living room to go get the food set up in the kitchen, no sign of anything out of place. Rose took in a sharp gasp and for just a second Rey had a flash of hope – hell, maybe this was some sort of thing where men couldn’t see his ghost – but then she moved over and scooped up Beebee from where he was curled up _beside_ Kylo, and Rey’s hopes were dashed.

As much as she tried to keep a lid on those feelings (maybe it was better this way, anyway, since Kylo had seemed on the fence about meeting them anyway), when she met eyes with Kylo, she could tell that it was written across her face how clearly disappointed she was.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” he said, giving her a tight smile.

Even though she knew she shouldn’t get her hopes up again, she couldn’t help but look around between her friends to see if any of them seemed to have heard anything. No reactions.

So she just looked back at Kylo and nodded, giving him a small smile and shrug as if to say, ‘what can you do?’

Kylo got to his feet and slipped up the stairs, seemingly having decided that there was no point in being down here if her friends couldn’t see him, which she couldn’t exactly argue with; plus, she wasn’t sure that she’d be able to hold it together if he stayed on the couch and one of her friends made to sit on him.

So she threw herself into the evening with her friends as they gathered around her kitchen island and went to town on Chinese takeout. And it was good enough, really.

It was easy, for the most part, slipping back into a routine with her friends and putting Kylo in the back of her mind. When Finn grabbed the remote to put on a movie, she could slide into the role of best friend vetoing his choices.

“I think we’re going to have to watch a horror movie,” Finn said, shaking his head.

“Oh, so that you have an excuse to sit in Poe’s lap?” Rose asked brightly as she leaned back against the couch cushions. Beebee was happily perched on her lap, and she was carefully holding her plate up so that the cat couldn’t attempt to steal any of it.

He laughed at her words and shook his head. “I would _never_ ,” he said. “I don’t need excuses.”

“So you still are going to subject us to your shit, huh?” Rey asked, grinning at him.

“Oh, absolutely,” Poe said. “Haven’t you missed that since you moved into your own place?”

Rolling her eyes at him, Rey stuck her leg out to try to kick him. “Oh, of course. So much.”

“If you two are going to cuddle,” Rose said, carefully setting her plate down and nudging the cat off of her lap, “then we’re going to cuddle.”

“We what?” Before Rey could question it any further, she found herself with Rose flinging herself over her, and she couldn’t help but laugh as her friend settled in on her lap. “Oh.”

Beebee meowed at them to express his displeasure at being dislodged from where he was sitting, and then disappeared up the stairs. When he next appeared a couple of hours later, he was trailing behind Kylo, who made his way through the room looking like he was doing his best to be invisible even though they both already knew he _was_ invisible.

But then the cat turned and doubled back towards him and Kylo stumbled so as not to run into him, and then he… _did_. His foot collided with Beebee in a way that it never had before, and Rey found herself taking in a sharp gasp of air.

“Is something wrong?” she heard Finn ask her, but she could hardly focus on anything that was happening in the room except for Kylo.

Kylo, who was now looking quickly between her and the cat, as if checking to see that she had seen it herself, that he wasn’t imagining this.

“Yeah, no, I just… Thought I was going to sneeze,” she managed to get out, and she didn’t care about whether or not it was a terrible excuse.

But there he was, the ghost in her home, getting down onto the floor and petting the cat. Actually, really petting him.

And she needed to know if she could touch Kylo, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a little heads up, I just started a new job so updates might start getting a little rocky!!


	8. Eight

As much as Rey was dying to find out if Kylo’s newfound ability to touch things extended to her, she didn’t get her answer as soon as she would have liked to.

Even after her friends left that evening, Kylo kept his distance, and Rey was tired enough that she was willing to just let it go and go to bed. He wasn’t around in the morning when she looked around for him, which was disappointing because she knew that it meant that it would be on her mind all day and she wouldn’t have the opportunity to have her question answered.

But it was fine.

And, as it turned out, it didn’t end up weighing on her mind nearly as much as she thought it would, because shortly after she arrived at the bakery and was getting prep work done in the back, she heard someone at the door. Trying the handle and then, upon realizing the door was locked, a sharp knock.

It wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary for someone to show up before opening time, and usually she was able to just pop out and see what they wanted, and usually she could accommodate that. She’d give them a pastry and they’d be merrily on their way.

She wiped her hands off on her apron as she moved around to the door from the kitchen into the front of house, stopping short when she saw a flash of red hair through the window as her heart started to pound. She took in a deep breath and let it back out slowly, telling herself that it couldn’t possibly be who she thought it was. But as she approached the door, the man’s perfect posture and neatly combed hair were, in fact, exactly as she remembered them. Hux.

She unlocked the door and swung it open, putting a bright smile onto her lips as she looked at him. “Good morning,” she said. “Is there anything that I can help you with?”

“I’m in a bit of a hurry,” he responded in lieu of a greeting; all told, she was fine with that. The sooner that he got to business and told her why he was here, then the sooner he would be gone. She didn’t like being here with a man that may or may not have been involved in Kylo’s death when no one else was around to witness anything. Rose had told her that she would come in to help her this morning, but they had never sorted out a specific time, so it could still potentially be quite some time before she showed up.

“Alright,” she said, nodding slowly.

“I found this place through a gift basket that was sent to me,” he explained, and it occurred to Rey that this man didn’t even remember that it had been her that delivered the basket. “I was told that it was from a Kylo Ren.”

“That’s right,” she said. Okay, maybe this was going somewhere; she wondered again if perhaps using Kylo’s name had been a bad idea, but if it meant that Hux was back here and she might get to find out something from him, then it was worth it, even if the lie made things messy. “I know that order.”

“And I just wanted to be sure that I had the details there correct,” he said.

“Alright,” she said, watching him for a moment. It was incredibly difficult to read him, and she could only guess at what exactly was going on in his mind.

“How far in advance of the delivery was the order placed?”

“Just two days before,” Rey replied. She knew that lying wasn’t a great skill to have, but she was still incredibly grateful that she had that ability at her disposal. Thinking on her feet had been something of a necessity at times, and she was glad for it.

“You saw him, two days before a basket was delivered to my office,” he repeated slowly, eyeing her suspiciously.

“That’s correct,” she said. She might as well commit to it, after all. If Hux had come here to murder her too, well, it’s not like she was going to get out of it now.

Hux’s eyes were intense as he looked at her, and she wasn’t sure what to make of it. She wanted to crawl out of her skin. “And you haven’t seen him since?”

“No, I haven’t,” she said. “He was only in just the once, as far as I know.”

“And he didn’t say anything about _why_ he was sending a gift basket?”

Shaking her head, she gave him her best apologetic smile. “He did not.”

“Interesting,” he said, shaking his head. “Again, I trust that you have my contact information and you’ll inform me if he comes back in?”

“Of course, sir,” she said. The word ‘sir’ sat heavy on her tongue; she hoped it might help to treat him with a level of respect she wasn’t sure he deserved, but even when serving customers she never felt quite right calling anyone sir or ma’am.

“Alright. Well, that’s all I needed,” he said, though he glanced over her shoulder at the display of pastries she had sitting out waiting.

After he made a quick purchase of a Danish, she sent him on his way and she was able to return to the kitchen and pick her morning routine back up unscathed.

As luck would have it, the door opened again just a couple of minutes later and for a brief moment her heart lurched and she worried that it was Hux, but then she looked up and she was relieved to find Rose standing there in the doorway.

“Why the fuck was Armitage Hux coming out of here just now?” she asked, her nose wrinkling in distaste.

And, well, that most definitely caught Rey off guard. “You… What? You know Hux?”

“I’ve had the misfortune of meeting him a couple of times,” Rose said with a nod. “His company has an ongoing contract with us for design projects. He’s the _worst_.”

“Yeah, he’s… He’s really something,” she said.

Rose tutted as she tossed her bag down and moved across the room to where a tray of cupcakes was cooling. She had an eye for detail and incredibly talented hands, which made her perfect to come in for decorating treats when she got the time. “Yeah, that’s a way of putting it,” she said, shaking her head. “But you know what, it makes perfect sense that he’d be the kind of guy to demand you let him in for his early morning bagel.”

“Danish,” she corrected with a little laugh. “But yes. He’s that kind of guy.”

“You shouldn’t have let him in,” Rose said. “That’d serve him right.”

Rey considered it for just a second, telling her about everything that was happening with Kylo and Hux and the fact that she didn’t know what to make of it all, but she knew that it would all sound crazy. So she just tucked the knowledge that Rose apparently had some amount of access to Hux in the back of her mind, and carried on with her day.

* * *

 

When Rey got home that evening, she had one mission in mind: she needed to know if she could touch Kylo. Now that the possibility was out there, she wouldn’t be able to rest until she knew for sure one way or another.

Luckily, he was there when she got home, sitting on the couch with Beebee perched proudly on his shoulders. When he turned his head at the sound of the door opening, there was a look of such genuine happiness on his face that she wasn’t sure she had ever seen before. It disappeared just as quickly, schooled into something a bit more indifferent. It made her ache.

“Hey,” she greeted him, giving him a small smile.

“Hi,” he said, lifting a hand up to help the cat get off of his shoulders more gracefully so that Beebee could greet her as well. “How was your day?”

For a brief second, she considered telling him about Hux. But that wouldn’t have accomplished anything, not really, and it would just make him worry (though he would never admit it, she could see that deep down he was very much the worrying kind). And this moment just felt so… soft, and perfect, and domestic in a way that she had never thought that she would crave as much as she suddenly did.

“It was good. Only mildly covered myself in flour,” she answered with a little grin.

Kylo nodded. “Well, that’s good,” he said. “But that’s what aprons are for, really.”

“It is indeed,” she said. She started to cross the room towards him, careful of Beebee who was winding himself between her legs as she walked.

When she reached him, she stopped for a moment, unsure of what to do next. She was a big believer in asking for consent, after all, and touching someone at random was just kind of a strange thing to do. And what happened if she tried to touch him and it didn’t work, would that be worse than the not knowing?

So they just stared at each other for a moment – Rey wished that she could know what was happening in his brain, because on her end she was lost in her own dilemma and his deep, soulful eyes – until she eventually lifted her hand out into the space between them tentatively as she asked, “Can I…?”

To her surprise, he pulled back sharply, moving to lean back against the cushions, seemingly wanting to put as much space between them as he could without having to move from where he was seated. “I—” he started, looking pained as he looked at her. “I’m sorry.”

She withdrew her hand, nodding slowly as she took a step back away from him. “No, no,” she said quickly, “I’m the one who should be sorry, that was… you know, rude. Invasive.”

Kylo brought his own hands up to his face then, a long breath escaping him as he rubbed his face, briefly disappearing behind his hands. She watched him, just waiting for him to say something. “Rey, really,” he said when he dropped his hands, looking up at her. “It isn’t… I don’t _not_ want you to touch me.” He looked a little bit confused by his own words, but she wasn’t going to interrupt him. “But I don’t know if I’m ready.”

“Okay,” she said, nodding slowly. She moved over to sit down as well, settling herself onto the other end of the couch.

He didn’t say anything for a long moment after that, and she almost thought that that was going to be the end of the conversation. But then he looked at her, his head tilted a little bit as if he were a dog utterly baffled by what was in front of him. “There’s… a lot that you don’t know about me, Rey,” he said eventually.

Nodding, Rey offered him a small understanding smile. “I’ve gotten that impression,” she said. “And, well… I’m all ears, whenever you want to tell me about yourself.” Then, after a moment, she hastily added, “But there’s no pressure, in the meantime.”

“Okay,” he said, nodding slowly. He took in a slow breath and let it back out, and she took in the way that his shoulders seemed to droop a little bit as he released some of the tension that he had been holding onto. “I think the most important thing that you need to know is that I… I lived alone.”

“I gathered as much,” she said, though she can also tell that he doesn’t mean it entirely literally. More than just the fact that he was the sole resident of this home, his life was a solitary one.

“I was never lonely, though,” he told her, a small frown on his lips. “I was perfectly content with it.”

“You don’t really seem that happy with that right now, though,” she pointed out, watching his face.

Sighing softly, Kylo lifted his hand to run his fingers through his hair. “No, I… I suppose that I’m not,” he said. “You know how they say you don’t know what you have until it’s gone? I think the same goes for the reverse.” She must have looked a little bit puzzled, because he went on to say, “You don’t realize what you’re missing until you have it.”

Rey watched him and nodded slowly, unsure of what exactly to say in response. She wanted to know if that meant that _she_ was the change in his life, if he was happy with that change. “So, you know what you were missing now?”

“I do,” he affirmed with a small nod, a sigh falling from his lips. “And I don’t know what to do with that now. It’s too late to change anything about the way I’d lived my life.”

“It’s never too late,” she said.

Raising an eyebrow at her, Kylo shook his head skeptically. “I’m dead,” he reminded her.

“But you’re still here,” she said. “And we can make the most of this time, in whatever form that takes.”

“I’m probably still confined to this townhouse, that doesn’t really lend itself to _carpe_ -ing any _diems_ ,” he said.

“No, but if…” she paused, wrestling with her words; she didn’t want to make this about her, didn’t want to make it sound like she thought that it was about her without him saying so himself, “If you are realizing now that you were… missing out on companionship, here you are. You don’t have to go anywhere. You have me – and you have Beebee, who you’ve really won over.”

A little laugh escaped him, and he nodded slowly. “I guess you have a point there,” he said. He looked down at the ground, where the cat in question is staring up at them with wide, bright eyes. He reached a hand out toward him, fingers wiggling to beckon him closer, saying, “It’s all just… new, I guess.”

“What is?”

“Wanting to be around people,” he said. “Wanting to even talk to someone rather than just sorting my mind out on my own. Realizing just how alone you were.”

Rey could understand his angle, while simultaneously entirely unable to understand – she had spent plenty of time in her own head, but she had never wanted to be there. She had always wanted to let her thoughts out. “So… this is better?” she asked, needing to have that confirmation.

“This is better,” he said. He looked at her, looking a little bit pained, before he turned his attention back to the cat sniffing at his fingers. He tutted at Beebee, who came closer and eventually hopped up onto his lap, happy to receive scratches under his chin.

Once again, Rey thought that the conversation was going to end there. She wanted to push Kylo into saying more – she could be a notorious pusher when she wanted to be – but she wanted to respect his boundaries.

She was grasping onto the thread of the conversation as tight as she could, trying to connect the dots between what he’d told her about his isolation and why he didn’t want her to touch him now, when he spoke again. “Do you remember how you mentioned that some people believe ghosts are around because they have unfinished business?”

“I do,” she said, nodding.

“I think that that’s why I’m okay with not pursuing finding out what happened to me,” he said.

“Oh,” she replied, because there was so much to unpack in the statement, and she wasn’t sure how much of it was all just in her head.

“I… like this,” he said. “Being here. With you.” He looked down, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed. “And I don’t know what happens next – I was raised Jewish, I don’t even…” he trailed off, shaking his head, “but whatever afterlife there is, I don’t know if it could be better than this, or if I’d even deserve any better than this.”

Rey wanted so badly to say something, _anything_ , that would make this better, but she felt utterly at a loss. “I would miss you,” she said instead, hoping that in some way she could convey that she had found herself caring for him far more than she had ever expected to, or at least have him understand what it meant to her that he was opening up – no matter how slowly – when it was clearly something that was difficult for him to do.

“I hope that I’d remember to miss you,” he said, and the sad smile on his face made her heart feel like it was being squeezed in her chest. “I want to hold onto this. I want to hold onto – I want to know about you, and have you know me in return.”

A brief silence passed between them, and then she started talking, telling him everything that she had still never been able to tell most of her friends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise I'm not dead, my work schedule is only kinda killing me!! I'm going to Galaxy's Edge next week, come see me hollering @becksolo on Twitter


	9. Nine

It had been a long time since Rey had really gone through the experiences that had brought her to where she was now. She hadn’t let herself linger on her childhood, because she had always found that it just brought her more pain than anything else.

For a long time, Rey had always felt as though there was something to be ashamed of in her past; like maybe all of it had been her own fault and if she had just been a better daughter, then her parents would have come back for her. And even once she had worked through her hangups about their abandonment and how it had never actually been her fault at all, she still had felt like it ought to be some big secret.

It had taken a long, long time for anyone in her life to get to hear about the finer details of what had led her to where she was now.

But somehow, it all came out so easily with Kylo.

It was easy to tell him about how she only had the fuzziest of memories of her parents, and how she wasn’t sure anymore if she had been genuinely happy with them or if the rose-tinted glasses made her memories more pleasant than they truly had been.

She found herself able to tell him in detail about how it had felt to be left alone, waiting for be found, a part of the story that she had always glossed over wherever possible. And she’d been able to tell him about the years she had spent moving from one foster home to another, eventually landing for far too long in the hands of Unkar Plutt.

And then it really felt like nothing but a relief when she could get to the nicer part of the story – meeting and getting hired by the eccentric Maz Kanata, which led her down the road to where she was now. She had no idea what she would have done without Maz, and she told Kylo as much; her entire life by now was so very shaped by the fact that she had been able to get settled into a solid career out of a job that she had initially assumed would just be something to keep her afloat as she got through college.

Rey had never been able to get through all of it without crying, which she hated to do, but for once it wasn’t so hard to let her guard down and show a little bit of vulnerability. It didn’t feel like Kylo looked at her any differently for it, and she was grateful.

She was exhausted by the end of it, and Kylo looked a little bit like he wanted to comfort her in some way, though he held himself back. She was grateful for it; she didn’t need pity, she didn’t need to be told that she was strong for having gone through what she had. She just wanted to be happy with where she was today, and she had a feeling that whatever had happened in Kylo’s past, he had been through a lot just the same.

“I’ll tell you, someday,” he told her, offering her a tight smile. She couldn’t help but wonder if he was still holding back out of a desire to continue to have unfinished business, or if he simply wasn’t ready; she was happy to wait, either way.

“I know,” she said, returning the smile. To take the pressure off of him, she grabbed the remote and turned the TV on, so that they would both have something to focus on.

She didn’t remember falling asleep, but the next thing she knew, she was waking up, curled up in her bed. It wasn’t entirely unusual for her to just fall asleep in her clothes without changing first after a long day, so it didn’t occur to her until later that she absolutely had not gone up to her bedroom on her own.

* * *

 

After their conversation, they didn’t really talk about it, which was easier. Rey was grateful to not feel like things had changed between them.

Things returned to normal – or as normal as they could be when there was a ghost in your home – and she fell back into her usual routines. When she would stay up and start prepping things for the next day in her kitchen at home, Kylo would be lingering nearby, watching her and occasionally asking questions about what she was doing. It was sweet.

In the background, of course, there was the fact that she couldn’t help herself but to continue to ask Rose about Hux. She knew that she should let it be, and most likely Rose would never be able to be close enough to Hux to give her any information about Kylo, but she still was curious. It was the only lead that she had been able to follow, and even if Kylo didn’t want to know what had happened to him, she would never be satisfied until she had at least _some_ kind of answer.

Which is how she ended up sitting on the couch with him one evening, unsettled and a little bit anxious, continuously shifting from one position to another.

Eventually, it reached a point where Kylo absolutely could not ignore it, though she could tell that he had been trying to mind his own business. He glanced over at her out of the corner of his eye, before eventually fully turning to face her. “What is it?”

“What?”

“You know what,” he said, lifting a hand to gesture vaguely over her. “There’s something bothering you.”

Rey let out a long breath, shaking her head at him. “I wouldn’t say that it’s _bothering_ me,” she said. “I just… well, it’s a couple of things. One, I have a confession.”

Frowning, he tilted his head slightly, and it would have been kind of adorable if she was less concerned with how he would react to this conversation. “What is it?”

“I’ve still kind of been looking into Hux,” she said.

“Why?” he asked.

Shrugging, she looked down, saying, “It’s not like I’m actively pursuing it. _He_ is the one that showed back up at the bakery.”

“He did what?” he asked, looking alarmed by her words.

“He didn’t actually do anything,” she assured him quickly, and it caught her by surprise to see the way that the concern and relief on his face was so genuine. “But it meant that my friend saw him, and it turns out that she actually works with him sometimes.”

“Okay,” he said slowly. “But I thought you established that he doesn’t know anything.”

“Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t,” she said. “But even if he has nothing to do with it, it seems like he’s at least curious about it, too.”

“You’re not fucking teaming up with him to play Nancy Drew,” Kylo said flatly.

She couldn’t help herself but to laugh, and she shook her head. “Does that make him Encyclopedia Brown?” she asked teasingly before growing more serious again, saying, “I’m not going to team up with him, I promise. I just… I kind of do want to know what happened, even if you don’t.”

Frowning at her, his brows knitted together. There was something in his expression that she couldn’t quite read, like he wanted to be mad at her, but there was something that held him back from quite having that reaction. “That’s really my decision and not yours.” His voice took on a hard edge, and as much as Rey didn’t want to admit it, she did know that he had every right to be bothered by her confession; that was probably why she hadn’t mentioned it to him, really.

“Okay, yes, but I don’t have to tell you,” she protested.

“I highly doubt that you would be able to keep it from me indefinitely,” he said.

“Probably not,” she said. “And I’m probably not going to find anything out, anyway. If I haven’t by now…” She trailed off, not wanting to finish the sentence. She hated the mere thought of just having to let this mystery die, and never know what happened to someone who was increasingly becoming an important part of her life.

Kylo didn’t say anything for a moment, letting his hands rub slowly over his face as he let out a long breath. He got to his feet before sitting back down again, looking at Rey as he asked, “What was the other thing?”

Having been fully expecting some harsh words about respecting his wishes or about how they should perhaps stop talking so much, Rey was caught off guard by that question. “What?”

“You said there were a couple of things,” he explained. “So what was the other thing?”

“Oh,” she said. “Right. I… It’s kind of related, but it’s also not. My friend, Rose, the one who knows Hux. I want to give it another shot at you meeting her, at least.”

Kylo just looked at her with a small frown, not saying anything.

“She’s curious about why I care about Hux at all, and she’s a great person, and she would be the most understanding of the whole ghost thing.”

“We still have no idea if she’ll even be able to see me, or anything,” he pointed out.

Waving off his words, she said, “I’m confident in it. And if not, then, well, I can be the in-between for you. You know, I’ll communicate what you’re saying to her.”

A dry laugh escaped him. “She’s going to think you’re crazy.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“You’re impossible,” he said, shaking his head. A long breath escaped him, and he looked at her for a moment before saying, “Fine. But you have to agree to something for me.”

“Of course,” she said with a quick nod.

“You have to promise that you’re going to let the Hux thing go,” he said. “No more contact with him, no asking Rose about him. Alright?”

All in all, it probably wasn’t going to be much of a loss to agree to it. It wasn’t as though she had learned much of anything from him, and she likely wasn’t going to. It would hurt to let go of what little shot she had at finding out what had caused Kylo’s death, but she could accept that.

“Okay,” she said, nodding. “Yes, I’ll forget about Hux.”

“Good. Thank you,” he said with a small nod. “So, when do you want me to meet your friend?”

“She’s going to be coming over for dinner tomorrow,” she said. It was soon, sure, but it still gave him a day to prepare if he needed to, plus it had the added benefit of not giving him much time to back down from agreeing.

“Tomorrow,” he said, nodding slowly. “Alright. Fine. Tomorrow, then.”

He didn’t seem particularly pleased with it, but he had accepted it, and that was going to have to be good enough.

* * *

 

The next day when Rose knocked at the door, Kylo was seated on the couch, looking fairly calm, though Rey was pretty certain she could feel a bit of anxiety rolling off of him. She had learned well enough by now that he didn’t like people much, so she couldn’t hold it against him for not being overly eager to meet a new person, even if he had seen her before and had an idea of what she was like.

Rey crossed the living room to let Rose in, taking in a deep breath.

She was trying not to get her hopes up, since reasonably there was nothing that should have made her expect that anything would be different, but so much had been changing with him that she couldn’t help herself but to think it was possible or maybe even likely.

She didn’t have to wait long for an answer.

Just about as soon as Rose stepped into the home, she looked past Rey as something caught her eye. She blinked in surprise, glancing back at Rey. “Who’s this?” she asked.

Kylo, for his part, looked just as surprised, and he gave the distinct impression of a deer in the headlights as he started to get to his feet.

“This is Kylo,” Rey explained, moving towards the man in question and gesturing for Rose to come over. “And Kylo, this is Rose.”

“I… It’s nice to meet you,” Kylo said. His shoulders were tense, but there was a small smile on his lips, and no matter how fake it was, Rey was happy that he was at least trying.

Rose smiled back at him. “It’s nice to meet you too. So, how do you know Rey?” she asked, reaching her hand out to offer it to him to shake.

Kylo just stared at her hand for a second, his own hand lifting part of the way up before he dropped it again. He looked at Rey, unsure.

“So,” Rey started. She had spent plenty of time trying to sort out the best way to explain this to Rose, but ultimately anything had sounded crazy enough that she wasn’t sure about how it would go over. She trusted that Rose would take this all in stride much better than any of her other friends would, but even at that it would still sound strange. “Remember how Finn was so creeped out by this place when I first moved in?”

Nodding in affirmation, Rose hummed and looking at Kylo curiously. “Because he thought it was haunted.”

“Exactly that,” she said. “It’s… Well. Here he is. The ghost.”

“The ghost.”

A long moment passed where no one said anything, and Rey was vaguely aware of Kylo taking a couple of small steps backward as if attempting to just walk away while avoiding being noticed.

And then Rose started to laugh, a bright grin spreading across her face. “Wait, are you – what do you mean, ghost?”

“I mean, Kylo is dead, and his spirit is still here.”

“So, not metaphorical ghost. Actual, literal ghost,” she said, looking positively delighted as she looked Kylo up and down. “You have a real, handsome ghost in your house.”

“I do,” Rey said, feeling a bit more relaxed as her friend at least didn’t seem too spooked by the concept. She should have known, of course, given that Rose would swear that he had once seen Bigfoot when she and her sister were out camping in their teenage years.

“Can I – ” Rose started and then stopped herself, shaking her head. “Sorry, you just look so real, you know? Are all ghosts like you?”

“I don’t know,” he said with a small shrug, looking down at himself. “I’m… the only ghost I know, I guess.”

“Right. I guess it’s not, like… You always think of, like, a bunch of ghosts hanging around a cemetery, right, but if you’re not haunting a cemetery…” she trailed off, shrugging. “Now that you mention it, though, I did get a little chill when I approached you.”

“Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry, I guess.”

“No, it’s okay, it’s actually kind of cool,” Rose told him, shaking her head. “It’s nice to have that, since you’re, like… you seem so physically real!”

Rey watched them talk, thinking about it for a moment. She wasn’t sure that she had felt a chill around Kylo in a while, though it was possible that she had just gotten used to it.

“I feel like I’m more real than I used to be,” Kylo admitted, catching Rey’s attention again.

“Oh?” Rose asked, raising her eyebrows.

“When I first showed up, I was barely here,” he said. “Rey didn’t even know I was here.”

“Really,” she said. “That’s so interesting. Were you, you know, invisible?”

“I guess that’s the best way of putting it,” he agreed.

Rose hummed, nodding. “So interesting,” she said. She looked down at his body, as if trying to see through him. “You seem really solid now. Can I touch you?”

“I’d really rather you didn’t,” he said.

“Okay, okay, that was overstepping,” she admitted, letting out a little laugh. “But is that something we’ve got wrong about ghosts? Can you, you know, walk through walls and stuff?”

“I don’t know. Probably not,” he said. “Yes, I can touch things. Hold things. Though, I didn’t used to be able to.”

Rose positively lit up, the intrigue of it all clearly exciting her.

“I’m going to go check on dinner, okay?” Rey cut in, offering them a small smile. Kylo didn’t look too worried about being left alone with Rose, so while she was going to keep an ear out for them, she wasn’t going to worry too much about it. He could handle himself, after all.

As she pulled the lasagna out of the oven, she could hear them talking in the other room. The conversation did end up turning to Hux, and she wished that she hadn’t missed catching how it had been brought up; it had to have been Kylo to mention him, though, being that Rose didn’t know the connection there.

But then Rose was walking into the kitchen after saying something about how she would ‘keep it in mind’ and it seemed like the moment had passed.

They sat down at the kitchen table to eat – Kylo sitting with them and watching, stoking Rose’s curiosity again at the fact that he did not in fact need food – and throughout dinner there were a few more questions about what it meant for Kylo to be a ghost. It was nice.

It gave Rey the feeling that maybe, once everyone knew about Kylo and what he was, everything would be fine. Maybe he could actually get along well with her friends.

At the end of the evening, Rose gave her a hug and informed them she would be doing research on ghosts before leaving, and there was even a small smile on Kylo’s lips, though it disappeared just as quickly as Rey spotted it.

“She was… a lot,” he commented, staring at the closed door.

“She can be,” Rey agreed. “But she’s nice.”

“I suppose she is,” he admitted, moving over to pick Beebee up – Rey had made many jokes about the cat being his emotional support animal – before he moved to sit back down on the couch.

Smiling softly at him, she said, “Thank you. For being nice to her, and putting up with her questions.”

Kylo shrugged, nodding. “She was just… curious. I can’t blame her for that.”

“Still,” she said. “I know you’re… weird about people. So, thank you, really.”

“Anything for you, Rey.”


	10. Ten

“I want to try to leave,” Kylo said one afternoon, catching Rey by surprise.

“Leave?” she echoed. She felt a little bit panicked for a moment. It might have made sense, after all, if he wanted to leave her home. He might have felt like he was intruding, and surely there were other places that he could go, even if Rey didn’t know where they were.

“Yeah. I’ve stayed here for a while, since I learned early on that I couldn’t go out,” he explained. “So I thought maybe we could try and have an outing.”

_An outing_. Implying, of course, that he was coming back. It came as far more of a relief than it should have. “Oh. Okay, yeah,” she said. “Anything in mind?”

“I’m not really particular,” he said, lifting a hand to run his fingers through his hair. “I don’t want to get my heart set on something anyway, after all.”

“Right,” she said. Chuckling, she added after a moment’s thought, “And it’s not like we can just plan on going out for lunch or anything, since you don’t eat.”

She had wondered, though, what would happen if he did try to eat even though he didn’t need to, but she wasn’t going to ask him to try to do that, in case it did end up being uncomfortable for him.

“Yeah,” he agreed with a small nod, watching her for a moment. “So I thought that I might just see about tagging along with you when you go out.”

Honestly, Rey had no idea what was going on with her emotions at the moment. It was really no big deal whatsoever that Kylo was going to choose to try to leave the townhouse with her company; but it still made something in her feel so much better. He could make the choice to try and leave the house at any time, really, and now that she thought about it, he absolutely could have left without even telling her a thing. She would have just been left to wonder where he had gone; she was suddenly all the more grateful that that was _not_ what he had done.

“Okay, sure thing,” she said, giving him a small smile and hoping that nothing about her betrayed the illogical panic she had felt thinking about him leaving. “We can go to the store, or work, or something.”

“Anything is fine,” he agreed, nodding.

They did not actually end up doing anything about Kylo’s desire to test his boundaries until a couple of days later; it was an unspoken agreement that it was a big step, and they were both a little bit nervous about it. But finally, here they were, Rey with her car keys in her hand and her bag slung over her shoulder, Kylo beside her shifting from one foot to the other as she opened the door.

It was nerve-wracking, there was no better word for the feeling.

Rey stepped outside first, walking backwards down the front steps outside of her door - and ignoring the way that Kylo was warning her to be careful - as the man stood just inside behind the threshold. They stayed like that for a moment, just looking at each other in silent recognition of the fact that what happened next had the power to change so much for them going forward.

“This was where it cut off before,” he told her, gesturing in front of him. “If I went any further, it was as if… I don’t know. Everything was fuzzy.”

The particulars of Kylo’s being were _fascinating_ , genuinely, but right at the moment, Rey couldn’t find it in her to care about anything other than the here and now, and what the rules governing him currently were. But she could recognize it for what it was - he was nervous, and he was stalling.

But finally, after a few more torturously long seconds, he took a few steps forward out of the front door. He was slow at first, tentative, but once he got out of the house with no problems, he carried on a short distance down the sidewalk at a reasonable pace, a hint of a smile appearing on his lips.

Rey let out the breath she had been holding, a giddy little laugh escaping her. She wanted to hug him, but she settled for bouncing on the balls of her feet for a moment just to do something with that excess energy. “Oh god, it’s like you’re real.”

“I am real,” he protested goodnaturedly, and she knew that he knew exactly what it was that she had been trying to say.

When he turned back to face her, she had her car keys dangling from her finger, a little grin on her lips. “Let’s go for a drive, Kylo.”

They got into her car (Kylo in the passenger seat because, as much as he would have liked to drive, they still weren’t entirely sure if everyone could see him, and it wasn’t as though he had his driver’s license with him) and rolled the windows down and took off. Despite having said they were going to do some grocery shopping, that didn’t feel right for the occasion so they just headed down the highway, driving aimlessly until the sun went down. Kylo didn’t say much, but the rare smile on his lips and the lack of tension in his shoulders told her that he was happy; she imagined it was the feeling of a man who had been jailed, finally freed.

* * *

 

After they established that Kylo could in fact leave home, he was going out with Rey just about whenever she left. It felt as though they were constantly together, and while she knew that it should have been suffocating, it just felt right more than anything. It filled her with a level of energy that she didn’t quite know that to do with.

She got back into the habit of jogging - it was something that she’d done a lot when she was younger, just taking off for a run whenever the weather was right for it (and sometimes when it wasn’t, because she wasn’t always the best at planning) - and when she went out, Kylo was right there by her side much of the time, pushing her to go faster. When he didn’t come along, there was the pleasant comfort of coming home to him on the couch, usually with Beebee curled up by his side.

He came with her to work a lot of the time, too, which was nice. He stayed in the back most of the time, still not a fan of being around other people, especially after spending so long completely secluded away from the rest of the outside world. Rey was happy to have him there, and she would give him little tasks here and there, just to keep him occupied.

Because Rose also liked to come by the bakery, citing the fact that it was an enjoyable break from her actual job, she and Kylo appeared to do a bit of bonding through the time that they were alone together in the back. Rey would be at the front of the shop and she’d hear their voices carrying through the windows, and it made her so happy. Kylo was an admitted misanthrope after all, but he had been willing to play nice with Rose, and that meant the world to Rey.

Which was how she ended up with Rose at the shop after close one evening, asking in a whisper if Kylo was around. He was not, in fact, because he had chosen to stay in that day, grumbling at Rey when she had asked him if he wanted to come along as she was getting ready to leave in the morning (he still didn’t need to sleep in a traditional sense, but he did seem to have times when his energy wore out and he was fainter than he usually was, as seemed to be the case that day).

Satisfied with that answer, Rose had pulled the broom out of Rey’s hands and dragged her over to a table. “We’re going to talk about Kylo,” she informed her.

“Really,” Rey deadpanned, looking at her with a raised eyebrow. “You came in here and asked me about Kylo’s whereabouts, and now you’re telling me that we’re going to talk about him. Never would have guessed.”

Laughing, Rose gave her arm a light smack. “Listen, this is serious.”

“Okay, okay. Serious. Let’s do this. What about him?”

“What are your intentions with him?”

“My intentions?” she asked, unable to help herself but to laugh a bit at the way her friend was talking as if she was Kylo’s protective mother or older sibling.

“Yes. What do you want with him, what do you _feel_ for him?”

Rey still felt significantly like she had taken crazy pills walking into this conversation, and she shrugged. “He’s my friend,” she said. “I want to help figure out what happened to him, but failing that, I really just… I want to be there for him. I want to be happy.”

“Okay. Sure, reasonable. But is that all?” Rose asked.

“I… don’t know.”

“So you’re saying that there is, possibly, the potential for you to have deeper feelings for him than just friendship,” she said. “Like... romantic, maybe?”

Speaking frankly, beyond the fact that Rey had to acknowledge the fact that Kylo was a very handsome man, she hadn’t really considered the possibility of having a romantic relationship with him. It had felt so far from the realm of possibility when he was literally intangible and invisible to any people other than her, but she had to admit that by now the way things were, there were far fewer hurdles that any possible relationship would have to get over vis a vis his being a ghost.

Which left mostly the factors such as, well, whether or not that romantic relationship was something she wanted to pursue.

Rey tried to think about it in terms of how she had felt for the other men she had been with in her past. She had never dated much, far too focused on her own life and making the best possible future for herself. She had gone out here and there with guys she had met in her classes or out and about, and Finn had most certainly set her up on blind dates from time to time, but nothing had ever lasted more than a couple of months at a time.

But with the men that she _had_ been with for any amount of time, the feelings that she had valued in a relationship had centered around how comfortable she was with them - if she wasn’t comfortable, she couldn’t stay. She was absolutely comfortable with Kylo. Beyond that, she trusted him with just about anything - she was alone with him most of the time, after all - and there was simply a feeling that things were _right_ when she was with him.

The way that she felt around him was unlike the way she had felt around anyone else, it was something beyond that, and she… Well, she hadn’t thought enough about it to put a label on it, until now.

When Rey turned her attention back to Rose, it was clear from the expression on her friend’s face - equal parts excited and smug - that she had taken a bit too long to mull over the question, and her answer was apparently self-evident.

“You do,” Rose said brightly. “I knew it.”

And admittedly, Rey could have seen this conversation going a different way. It wasn’t as though she didn’t know that Rose also found Kylo attractive; she had outright mentioned how handsome he was. It wouldn’t have surprised her if that, coupled with the time the two had spent talking about god knows what, had turned into a genuine attraction. So she said as much. “You’re not interested in him?”

Raising an eyebrow at her, Rose just laughed and shook her head. “No! I mean, is he good-looking? Sure,” she said, waving her hand as if to waft the very idea out of the air. “But I respect dibs.”

“I didn’t call dibs on him,” she said.

“Not out loud, no,” she said. “But emotionally. Plus, he’s the ghost that lives in your house. I recognize fate when I see it.”

“It’s - it’s not fate,” she protested, a laugh escaping her at the idea. Sure, there was something outside the realm of what she would typically call ‘normal’ going on here, but Rey would not go so far as to bring fate into this.

“Okay, okay, not fate, then,” she said. “But it is _something_.”

And Rey could absolutely accept that: a nebulous something, possibly the same something that was keeping Kylo’s spirit around, possibly not. “Something, sure,” she said.

“And even if I didn’t feel like you had dibs, I wouldn’t bother going for it myself,” she said, and Rey didn’t have the chance to ask her why before she was explaining, “Because rejection is tough. And he clearly has it bad for you.”

There was a lot that Rey was willing to suspend her disbelief on, but that was a little bit beyond what she could buy. “No, he does not.”

“He _absolutely_ does, whether or not you want to admit to it,” she said.

“No, he doesn’t,” she reiterated, shaking her head. “What makes you think that he does?”

“It’s everything! It’s all about the way he looks at you, and the way he talks about you,” Rose said, her voice rising a little bit with her enthusiasm. “Like, yeah, we talk, but that’s basically for him to kill time until he gets to see you again. If he could, he would probably steal you away to some ghostly realm to have you just to himself.”

Rey was absolutely still less than convinced, but she wasn’t going to try and argue the point with Rose, knowing that the more she protested, the more her friend would push back as well, until eventually she escalated to the point of claiming that Kylo was fully in love with her and moments from proposing.

“The point is, anyway, that I wanted to see where you were at, and make sure that you know I’m not going to step on any toes here,” Rose told her, reaching out to pat her arm. “And that I think you should absolutely go for it.”

She navigated the conversation elsewhere (in spite of Rose’s indignant, _“I know you’re trying to change the subject!”_ ) and they worked on cleaning up together as they chatted. Before too much longer, they were heading home, though the conversation about Kylo was still weighing on her mind for the rest of the evening.

It wasn’t as though she really needed to do anything about it, but the whole situation suddenly felt like it had been tilted over on its axis. Realizing that she had feelings for Kylo wasn’t particularly earth-shattering, she supposed, or maybe none of the individual parts of this situation were too overwhelming, but once added together it felt like _so much_.

Her feelings for Kylo were… it was a strange thing. The situation around them would make it more difficult for them to be together, but it wasn’t as though it were completely insurmountable. It was really just a gentle comfort, being around him and knowing that his presence was a steady one in her life; if she needed him, he would be there.

It wasn’t as though it was strange for Rose to ever probe a bit into her love life, either; she just wanted her to be happy, and he definitely couldn’t hold that against her. It was also just like Rose to check in with her to make sure that there was no confusion about where the relationship between Kylo and herself was, not that it had even been something she would have thought to be concerned about.

As much as Rey liked spending time with Kylo, she knew that it wasn’t healthy to put all of your social needs into one person, for either party. So it didn’t even register to her as the sort of thing that might be a problem; she simply wasn’t a jealous person, especially not when it came to someone as good-hearted as Rose. If it had turned out that Kylo developed feelings for Rose, then Rey would have given them her blessing; there were few people she would have trusted more to treat him right.

But ultimately, it wasn’t something that she was going to act on, she reflected as she watched Kylo from across the living room. They hadn’t even touched, not even brushing up against each other as they crossed paths. Would they have to keep that up if they were to pursue a relationship? An image of them formed in her mind, keeping a pillow wall between them and kissing with a Saran wrap barrier a la Pushing Daisies; she couldn’t help but laugh at the thought, making Kylo look up and give her a quizzical look.

So, she didn’t need to worry about it or act on it at all, but she could still keep it in the back of her mind. She could admire him and have a sort of a name for it (“romantic affection,” she’d settled on, as it didn’t feel too overly committal), and that was absolutely good enough for her.

* * *

 

A few mornings after Rey and Rose’s talk, Kylo elected to come along with Rey to work again, which she was entirely happy to allow.

He was always quiet when he was there, just milling about in the back or helping in whatever small ways that she asked him to. He was, she noted with humor, like a ghost, just present there in the background.

The morning rush had passed, and though there were still a few more customers in the bakery, it was fairly quiet and Rey felt like she finally had a little bit of time to breathe.

One of her regulars had come in and, as usually happened, Rey chatted with him a bit. She had occasionally gotten the feeling that the man was interested in her, and on occasion he had even asked her to lunch and she wasn’t entirely sure whether they were friendly invitations or something more, but it had never escalated. She didn’t have the inclination, and for much of her history she had just been too busy to date.

“Yeah, so the exhibit opens on Saturday and runs the rest of the month, so if you want to stop by, that would be…” he was saying, his words slowing gradually before coming to a complete stop as he glanced at something over Rey’s shoulder. “Ah, hey man, how’s it going?” Though his words were casual, his tone betrayed something that might have even been a bit of fear.

Rey could feel a familiar chill creep down her back, and she didn’t have to turn around to know that Kylo was behind her, lingering a bit too closely.

Not once had he come out of the back when there was anyone else in the bakery; he would occasionally peek out, or talk to Rey, but if he could avoid the possibility of stepping out and actually being seen by anyone, he would. And yet, here he was.

“Hi,” he spoke, and Rey wasn’t sure that she had ever heard a less friendly-sounding greeting. “Did you need something? Rey’s a very busy person.”

There was a moment where the other man looked up at him, sputtering a little bit before taking a step away from the counter, picking up the paper bag that contained his muffin. “Oh. No, ah, you’re right, I should get going,” he said. Glancing back at Rey and then back again, he said, “I didn’t know you had a - um, that you were dating a - yeah. Have a good day.”

Rey watched as he retreated from the bakery, before wheeling around and facing Kylo. “Kylo!” she hissed, pointing an accusatory finger at his chest. “What was that?”

For his part, as he turned his gaze away from the door, he did have the decency to look a little bit ashamed of his actions. “I just…” he started, gesturing in the direction of the entrance as if that explained everything. “He…”

“He is a loyal customer,” she said. “And he wasn’t doing anything wrong. Do you see a line?”

“Well, no,” he said, and Rey wasn’t sure whether or not she was imagining a bit of color tinting his cheeks. Well, if he was embarrassed, so be it. “And I didn’t even know he would be able to see me.”

“So you thought you should just hang out right behind me?”

“When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound like the greatest of ideas.”

Despite her irritation with him over whatever that display was, she couldn’t help herself but to let out a laugh at his words. “No. No, actually, it wasn’t the greatest of ideas.”

“It is definitely possible that I overreacted,” Kylo said after a moment.

“Seeing as there was nothing to react to, much less overreact, yes,” she said. “Get back in the kitchen before you do something more ridiculous.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, giving her a quick salute before pushing the door into the back open again and disappearing.

She watched the door for another moment before continuing on with her day; she hated the idea of giving Rose’s conspiracies fuel, but she might have to run this encounter by her to get her input.


	11. Eleven

As Rey’s life settled into her new reality of having Kylo being more and more corporeal and - perhaps more startling - an object of her affection, it was easy to let it slip to the back of her mind that he was not, in fact, _alive_ and that they didn’t know why that was.

So when Rey saw Rose for lunch one afternoon and one of the first things that she mentioned once they had sat down was Hux, it knocked her off-kilter for a moment.

“Here’s the thing about Hux,” Rose had said, and suddenly it was real again that Kylo was dead, possibly murdered, and they didn’t know.

“Okay,” she said slowly, incredibly unsure as to whether or not she wanted to hear whatever came next from Rose’s mouth.

“I looked into his browser history,” she said. With anything else, this would probably lead to an immature joke and some snickering, but the topic felt too somber and in any case, she couldn’t picture - didn’t _want_ to picture - Hux’s private time with his computer.

But still, Rey needed a little bit of levity. “Like the master hacker you are, yes,” she commented with a little chuckle, smiling at her.

“I didn’t find anything earth shattering, or really too surprising, I guess, but… I thought you ought to know,” she said. “He’s still been looking for Kylo.”

“What do you mean, he’s looking for Kylo?”

“I mean that he’s spending a significant amount of time doing searches for him, or anything about him,” Rose said, shrugging. “Some of the same looking I’ve been doing, honestly. But he’s just so hard to track - he’s tightlipped about a lot of things, we don’t know of any family to search for him through who may have some idea of what happened…”

Rey let out a soft breath, knowing exactly what Rose was talking about. She felt by now like she knew Kylo very well, but at the same time it also felt like she knew practically nothing concrete about him. “I don’t think his family would know, even if we knew where they were,” she said.

“Maybe, maybe not. But it’s a moot point anyway, I guess,” she said. “The point here is, though… Hux clearly doesn’t know what’s going on, either.”

“So you’re suggesting that he’s innocent?” she asked.

“He could be,” Rose said, shaking her head. “I would say he might be covering his tracks, but this would be a pretty hefty level of commitment, being that he shouldn’t have been expecting anyone to be looking at his browser history. That said… that’s the interesting thing, too. He stopped.”

“He stopped?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Yeah, before last Tuesday, it looks like he was looking at various points throughout the day, and then suddenly he just… stopped.”

“Okay,” Rey said slowly, a small frown on his lips.

“It may not mean anything, it may mean that he found the answers he wanted, or… He may have given up.”

“Right,” she said. “So, that’s actually almost more concerning than if he had just kept looking.”

“It is, yeah. But at least it does give us a little bit of, like… At least at this point it doesn’t seem like anyone else is looking for answers but us.”

Rey nodded slowly, leaning her head back for a moment and rubbing her hands over his face. “Well, thank you,” she said. “I’m… I don’t even know anymore if we actually… want to know, so I guess it’s okay.” It felt a little bit strange referring to herself and Kylo as a collective, but it was what was accurate, at least.

“Why wouldn’t you at least want to know? Just for your own peace of mind?” she asked. “I’m sure if Hux - or whoever - wanted to, they could figure out where Kylo lived and find you.”

“And then what? They don’t know that Kylo is still around,” Rey pointed out. It wasn’t as though Rose wasn’t making a good argument, she absolutely was, and it was even the same lines she had been thinking along. But now there was just a definite layer of fear that came along with the thought of learning more about Kylo’s death.

“We don’t know what it is that we’re dealing with,” she said.

Shaking her head, Rey let out a soft breath. “You said ‘what’ like it’s some kind of monster.”

“It could be,” she said. “It could be anything, since we have no idea. Kylo isn’t a normal ghost, I don’t think.”  
“What is a normal ghost like?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But this feels… I don’t know. It seems like something is off.”

Admittedly, Rey didn’t think that she was wrong on that. Sure, she didn’t know much about ghosts and up until she had met Kylo, she had been pretty sure that ghosts were actually fiction, but he did feel like an unusual ghost, though she acknowledged that that made no real sense. “Well, whatever it is, whatever he is, it’s… It’s fine. And he’s already made it clear to me before that he doesn’t want to know.”

“Okay, okay. But again I kind of have to ask why not?”

“Finding out how he died might be a terrible idea. It’d open up a whole can of worms,” she said. “What if I find out that he died in some horrible, awful way? What if I have to spend the rest of my life picturing his mutilated body? _Plus_ , it might make him disappear.”

“Disappear?”

“Yeah, like… Ghosts stick around because they have unfinished business,” she said. “And if his unfinished business is, you know, avenging his death…”

“Then just don’t avenge his death,” Rose supplied helpfully. “And besides, he has new unfinished business: you.”

And that was… strangely comforting. All the same, she rolled her eyes at Rose’s words and decided to navigate the subject away.

She had no idea whether it was a good or a bad thing that Hux was no longer looking for Kylo, or what that meant for them in the future. But she wasn’t going to let that unknown take her over, nor was she going to be fearful because of it. She had Kylo, and she trusted that it would be alright.

* * *

 

Over the coming days, there was a feeling that things had changed between her and Kylo, and Rey wasn’t entirely sure whether it was real or imagined.

It was probably all in her head, but it definitely felt as though they were building to something.

She had been experimenting at home with making bread, and Kylo was through her side for all of it, making incredibly helpful (read: not at all helpful) comments all the way. But then she would look up and she would find his eyes on her, an expression on his face that was fairly unreadable. There was admiration there, maybe, or maybe she was just hoping that there was.

Once when she had caught him staring at her, she called him out on it, and he had sputtered for a moment before informing her that it was just because of the amount of flour she had on her face.

“Fix it, then,” she told him with a laugh, fully convinced that he would not actually do anything about the flour, if there even was flour on her face (not that she doubted it, of course; she touched her face a lot, and there was plenty of flour on her hands).

Kylo just nodded, moving around the kitchen island to grab a washrag and wetting it in the sink before returning to her side. “Turn,” he said.

She did, turning to the side to face him and taking a small step closer to him, chin tipped up to face him properly.

He looked at her for a moment as if he was appraising her, then lifted his hand to rub the cloth along her left cheekbone. His eyes were boring into hers as he wiped her cheek clean, and she felt as though he could see right through her, right to the deepest parts of herself. And somehow, even though Kylo was one of the most physically imposing men she had ever met, it wasn’t intimidating in the slightest.

It struck her that this was still the closest they had come to actually touching each other - she could feel the gentle pressure of his hand against hers, separated by the barrier created by the rag, but it was enough. It wasn’t as though she’d have been able to feel the warmth of his hand anyway, being that he still produced a chill wherever he went, and even though the rag itself was a little bit rough against her skin in a way that his fingertips would have been, she might have actually combusted if she’d felt his fingers against her skin.

After a moment - maybe too long of a moment? - he pulled away, looking down as he pulled the rag away from her face. “Better,” he informed her as he turned away, hanging the wash rag over the sink wall.

“Oh,” she said. “Good.”

He returned to the bar stool that he had been sitting on, and she returned to the dough she was working on, and when she looked back at him, he looked so _casual_. Like it absolutely did not impact him in the slightest, while she was standing there with her heart pounding hard enough that it almost hurt.

But then she had looked at him again a few minutes later, and his gaze was focused on his hands, and there was a little bit of color to his cheeks, and she couldn’t help but wonder what was going on in his brain.

It was just little things like that, seemingly insignificant on the surface level but felt more important, that made it feel like they were standing on the precipice, about to jump off into something big.

* * *

 

Kylo didn’t technically need to sleep, which meant that he was a pretty good companion on nights when Rey couldn’t convince her brain to fall asleep.

She never really knew what to expect when she got herself out of bed to find him. Sometimes he would be wandering the house aimlessly, sometimes he would be going through the motions of sleeping, curled up on the couch or in the guest room, and sometimes he would be outside on the front steps, staring up at the stars.

Tonight he was in front of the television in the living room. The overhead lamp was off, and the pale blue light that was being emitted from the screen was the only light source in the room, casting Kylo in almost a spooky light. She moved over toward the couch, preparing some sort of joke about him driving up her electric bills all for the sake of late night infomercials.

It took her a moment to realize that it wasn’t just the light giving him a strange effect - something was off. He was pale; no, he was actually a little bit _translucent_ again, and while he seemed to be looking at the TV, his eyes were unfocused, seeming to stare for a mile ahead of him.

“Kylo?” she asked, hating how tiny and scared her voice sounded.

She waited for a moment, watching him and waiting for him to react. He didn’t.

“Kylo, hey,” she urged, reaching a hand out and waving it in front of his face. It didn’t seem to faze him, and even though she wasn’t very surprised by that, it still made her ache. “Kylo.”

She continued to say his name in various volumes and degrees of concern, but it didn’t seem to reach him. She tried not to let her mind wander off into any of the possible terrifying directions it wanted to, keeping herself rooted in the moment. He was still here; that was the important thing.

She immediately felt selfish for that thought, too, of course; wasn’t it supposed to be a good thing if he did actually move forward from here? If his soul found peace and he could go do whatever came next? But god, if that was what was happening, why did he have to find peace at two in the morning in front of an infomercial for goddamn Flex Seal? And shouldn’t he be disappearing for real if that was the case?

She could hardly imagine what he would say if he saw her right now; nearly panicking, shaking a little bit, all because he wasn’t responding. She tried to imagine him making fun of her for it; it didn’t make her feel any better.

She stared at him for a bit longer, a hand frozen in the air as she was reaching out toward him; she had no idea anymore whether or not she ought to touch him. He had decided against touching her before and she had to respect that, and ever since it had felt like maybe they were waiting for some special “right” moment.

And this… This didn’t feel right. Nothing about it felt right.

But maybe it was what he needed? Maybe? Hopefully? It could be like Sleeping Beauty’s kiss, but just… a touch of the hand.

Regardless of whether or not it was the right time, she supposed, she was out of other options, and she couldn’t do _nothing_.

After taking in a deep breath to steel her nerves, she reached her hand out for him, almost immediately flinching back when her hand connected with his skin. He was still cold as ever, a jarring reminder that he was not alive, and his arm was firm. Toned, muscled, however she wanted to put it - now was not the time to be lingering on that.

“Kylo?” she tried again, her voice quiet as she curled her fingers around his upper arm. She watched his face for any tiny suggestion of movement or recognition, slowly letting her hand slide down along his arm to find his own hand. She allowed herself to lace their fingers together, looking down and observing the way that her hand looked so tiny against his. It felt right, given how very tiny, so helpless she felt in this moment.

Kylo didn’t respond, didn’t move at all to acknowledge her presence or her touch. She bit down on her lip, not realizing until too late that she was drawing blood.

“Fuck,” she let out under her breath, just watching Kylo for a moment. He was tense, stiff, but she could still pull him and move him if she wanted to. Part of her wanted to pull him so that he was laying down, like he was just taking a nap, but she wasn’t sure if that would make her feel any better, either.

So she just moved closer to him, deciding that if this was it, if he was just going to disappear into nothingness after this, then at least she could take some comfort in his presence one last time. It would have felt wrong to get too much into his personal space, but she leaned in closer to him, lightly resting her cheek against his shoulder and closing her eyes, committing the feeling of her hand in his to memory.

 


	12. Twelve

In the cold light of morning, there was no longer any hint of Kylo in the townhouse. No lingering specter of him in her living room, no frozen image of him, seemingly locked in time. Nothing.

It felt strange to realize that once upon a time, not even that long ago in the grand scheme of things, she probably would have been pleased with this - her home was well and truly her own, and there was no one else inhabiting that space. It could have been good, if not for the gnawing feeling that she shouldn’t be alone, and that something was wrong.

After looping Rose in and taking a stab at a few more desperate, fruitless Google searches on how to lure ghosts  _ back  _ to a haunted location (the results of which Rose quickly nixed, telling her that just because Kylo was a good ghost did not mean that all the spirits she might encounter were), she was left with the feeling of being completely helpless. There was nothing she could do to bring Kylo back, and all of the feelings that had been left unsaid always were going to be unsaid, and that… hurt. It really hurt.

Rey spent more of her time away from her home in the days that followed. For a little bit, she was reluctant to leave, just in case he came back and she didn’t want to miss him, but eventually she had to acknowledge that it wasn’t going to happen and she couldn’t stand to be there.

The townhouse was - well, haunted, for lack of a better word, by his memory. Her entire time there had been so steeped in his presence, and even beyond that, she couldn’t help but wonder what things had been like when he’d lived here before her. They had never gotten much into it, given how much Kylo wasn’t eager to be open about his life, but she could picture little snapshots. Him in the kitchen, making himself dinner. Standing in the doorway looking out the window, checking the weather before he left.

It hurt to think about, and yet she couldn’t stop thinking about it.

So, she decided to spend less time at home. She would get up in the morning and feed Beebee, then find something to occupy herself for most of the day, until she could just curl up in bed and go straight to sleep. The bakery had never been cleaner in as long as she’d worked there, she was pretty sure. She saw more of Finn and Poe and Rose than she had in the time since she’d moved, and it was good. Rose was worried about her, and she could tell that Finn and Poe could tell that there was something going on, but they didn’t ask, and that was good enough for her.

She knew that running away from her problems and just trying to avoid them wasn’t productive and would probably just prolong the pain, but she couldn’t help herself. It felt better for now, and while she was usually a patient person, sometimes it felt like it helped to hurt less  _ now _ .

But she couldn’t avoid home entirely, not indefinitely, especially if she wanted to eat without completely wrecking her budget. Conveniently, however, going to the grocery store did mean a trip out of the house, so she could live with that.

There was a sort of zen that came with going through the grocery store - she knew the aisles well enough to be able to get everything she needed without having to think too hard or look too much for any specific item, and she timed her visits so that they would never be at particularly busy times. More or less, she could navigate the trip on autopilot.

Until she found herself in the baking aisle and encountered a woman who looked to be on the edge of tears.

The woman looked pretty well put together, dressed well in clean, crisp fabric, with her hair pulled up in an elaborate bun. Aside from the red rims around her eyes and the way she was carrying herself - heavy, like she was holding a great load on her shoulders - nothing seemed at all off about her appearance; Rey wondered if she was the sort of person who found comfort in going through the routines of doing her hair and makeup. She looked professional, really, the sort of person that Rey did generally expect to have it together enough to show up to the grocery store this early in the morning. Nothing about her gave off the vibe that some did that told Rey to keep her distance from them.

In fact, something inside of Rey felt compelled to approach her. Generally speaking, while Rey was a friendly and helpful person, she also tended not to go too much out of her way just to look out for other people. It was nice to be able to, absolutely, but too much of her lifetime had been spent having to look out for herself alone because no one else would. But today, she felt like she needed to help this woman.

“Hi,” she said, unsure of what else to say to this woman. She cleared her throat, looking down for a moment and briefly considering just bolting before she looked back at the woman again. “I couldn’t help but notice that you look kind of… upset?” The words sounded awkward coming out of her mouth, and she could only hope that the woman wasn’t made uncomfortable by any or all of this.

The woman looked up at her, a laugh that sounded more sad than anything else escaping her. “Oh,” she said, a little smile blooming on her lips that made Rey immediately grateful that she had stopped. “I’m…” She paused, seeming to struggle with her words for a moment. “You could say that.”

Rey wasn’t completely sure how to move forward from here - she wasn’t the most touchy-feely person, and though she liked to be helpful, navigating sensitive conversations was never going to come too naturally to her. “Is everything okay?” she asked. “Do you want to talk about it?”

The woman looked at her for a moment, as if she was considering her, before nodding as she looked back at the shelf she was standing in front of. “I’m just… overwhelmed, I guess you could say,” she said. “There’s a lot going on right now.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment and Rey nodded in a way that she hoped came across as sympathetic, and was about to tell her she was sorry to hear that when she continued.

“My son is… He’s in the hospital,” she explained, a sigh falling from her lips.

“Oh. That’s terrible, I’m so sorry.”

“I’ve seen him more since he’s been in the hospital than I’ve seen him in years,” the woman added, and there was something that wasn’t quite a smile - but wasn’t quite not a smile, either - on her lips until she seemed to remember how grave the situation was. “And it’s probably only not escalated into yelling because he’s not awake to get angry with me.”

As much as Rey wanted to help this woman, this had ventured into territory that she wasn’t sure she was prepared for. “Is he…?” she started and trailed off, realizing that she neither knew exactly what she was asking, or how to ask whatever it was that she wanted to ask. But the unfinished question hung in the air uncomfortably, so she had to settle on a safer option: “How is he?”

“He’s in a coma. He was in an accident, and it’s...  Well, the doctors aren’t committing to anything, and usually that doesn’t mean good news, does it?” she said. “There are good and bad days.”

“Well, then you need to hang onto the good days,” Rey said, because she knew that to be the case in her own life - things weren’t always good, sometimes they were awful, but she had to keep going, and the thoughts of better days were what got her there.

“I do,” she agreed. “It’s… honestly, it’s just been nice being able to talk to him, even if he hasn’t been saying anything back.”

“Were you… close?”

“No, and that’s my own fault,” the woman said, shaking her head as she looked back at Rey. “And it hurts, knowing that I could have tried harder to fix it, and now I might be losing him entirely.”

And that definitely got to Rey. She knew that what she was feeling was nowhere near the level of pain that this woman was experiencing - losing a guy living in your house who you were just realizing you had feelings for could never compare to losing your son - but she knew the pain of grief all too well. Even independent of Kylo, she’d been mourning the loss of her family for most of her life. “You’re not,” she said. “He’ll come back to you, I’m sure of it.”

“Well… We can definitely hope so, anyway,” she said. Sighing, she shook herself and went on, “Anyway. I don’t know why I’m loading all of this on you.”

“It’s okay,” Rey assured her, giving her a small smile. “Sometimes talking helps, I know that.”

The woman nodded, shifting the shopping basket she was holding from one arm to the other. “I’ve been doing a lot of things in hopes that they’ll help,” she admitted. “Some more… reasonable than others.”

“I’m sure that it’s all reasonable,” she said.

“You’re a very sweet girl,” she said. Looking back at the shelf, she said, “The idea today was to try and make one of his favorite treats from when Ben was young. They say that smells and sounds can reach them, and it’s… Well, it probably sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?”

“No, it doesn’t,” she said. “It makes sense. Maybe it could help pull him back.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But then, I felt guilty enough leaving for long enough to come to the store - it comes in waves, but he’s been doing a lot better the past couple of days, and I was never the greatest at baking - “

And there it was. That was the reason that this woman had seemed to call out to Rey, that was how she could help her. “I can bake,” Rey cut in, and then took a small step backward, realizing that she had perhaps said that a bit too enthusiastically. “I mean, I run a bakery.”

“Do you now?” the woman said, almost looking a little amused by her.

“Yes,” she said, reaching into her pockets to dig around for something to write on. Maz had mentioned getting and carrying business cards around once upon a time, and she had always felt like it was unnecessary, but suddenly she was cursing herself for having had that belief. Finding an old receipt in the bottom of her bag, she quickly jotted down the name of the bakery and her phone number before offering it over to the woman. “Hi. That’s my number, I - I’m Rey, by the way - I wouldn’t charge you, but I can make just about anything that you could want.”

The woman smiled at her, an honest, warm smile, and nodded as she tucked the paper away in her own purse. “Thank you, Rey,” she said. “That would mean a lot to me, actually.”

Rey nodded, giving her a smile in return. “Of course,” she said. “I might even be able to deliver them for you? To the hospital?” She paused, realizing that that might have sounded like a strange offer, like maybe she was trying to invade her privacy. “Just, if that’s easier for you.”

“I appreciate it,” she said. “I’ll be in touch.”

With that, the woman gave her another smile before turning to walk away, and Rey watched her go for a moment before carrying on with her shopping herself, feeling like finally something was a little bit closer to right.

* * *

A couple of days passed, and Rey didn’t hear from the woman. Which was fine, really. She had a lot on her plate, after all, and getting some cookies probably wasn’t at the top of her list of priorities.

In fact, when Rey’s phone did ring, she almost forgot that she had been waiting for a call. She jumped a little - she’d given her personal phone, which usually didn’t ring because most her friends preferred to text - before looking at the unknown number with a frown and answering the call. “Hello?”

“Hello, is this Rey?” the voice on the other end of the line asked.

“Yes, this is her.”

“Perfect, this is Leia,” she replied. “We spoke in the grocery store the other day.”

“Oh. Oh! Hi, Leia, how are you?” she asked, and then shook her head at herself; there was no way that Leia was doing  _ great _ .

“I’m doing well enough,” she told her, and there was a tiredness in her voice that Rey thought it was best not to comment on. “I thought I might take you up on that offer to bake for Ben.”

“Of course, absolutely,” she said, nodding a little bit to herself. She opened up a drawer to fetch out a pad to write on, going on, “So, do you have something specific in mind?”

“I do,” Leia answered. “When he was young, he loved peanut butter cookies. Especially when they’re made with a Hershey kiss on top.”

“Oh,” Rey responded, feeling for just a moment like her world had ground to a halt.

_ * _

_ “Okay, so, I know you can’t eat,” Rey started, pushing herself up to sit on her kitchen counter and watching as Kylo sat on the floor playing with Beebee. _

_ “Way to rub it in,” he commented, “but go on.” _

_ She laughed, shaking her head at him. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said. “You constantly tell me how terribly unhealthy everything I make is.” _

_ “It’s a coping mechanism, Rey,” he said. “If I didn’t constantly remind you of how terrible-for-you everything you make is, how the hell would I handle living with you?” _

_ “Poor thing,” she said. _

_ “Anyway,” he said, looking up at her, a trace of a smile on his lips. “What were you going to say?” _

_ “I was just curious as to what you would eat, if you could,” she said. “Specifically, maybe, what your favorite baked good is.” _

_ “Ah, so you can torture me by making that when you’re mad at me.” _

_ Rey chuckled, shaking her head and raising an eyebrow at him. “When have I ever been mad at you?” _

_ “Well, it’s bound to happen eventually,” he said. She wanted to tell him that she couldn’t imagine ever being mad at him, but she decided to let it go. “So, peanut butter cookies. The ones with the chocolates on top.” _

_ “Peanut butter blossoms. Nice choice,” she said with a soft hum. _

_ “You know, it kind of feels like you’re patronizing me.” _

_ “No, no, I mean it, really,” Rey said. “And I get it. It’s a little salty, a little sweet. Just like you.” _

_ Groaning, he shook his head at her. “Any opportunity for a dig, huh?” _

_ “Okay, listen, I said that with nothing but care in my heart.” _

_ “Brat.” _

_ “If you ever happen to, you know, return to the mortal realm, then I promise, I’ll make you some peanut butter blossoms.” _

_ * _

Then a voice jolted her back to the present. “I hope that’s not too much trouble,” Leia was saying, and Rey realized that she had probably been silent for far too long.

“No, no, not at all,” she assured her quickly. “They’re not too difficult to make. It’s just, they’re a favorite of one of my friends, too.”

“Ah, wonderful. I wouldn’t want to trouble you too much,” she said.

“Never. It’s fine, really,” Rey said.

The phone call didn’t last much longer than that, with Rey getting a few more details about what hospital she would find Leia and this  _ Ben Solo _ before promising to bring the cookies by while they were still warm.

After she hung up, Rey sprung into action almost immediately, pulling her apron from the hook and tying it behind her waist. She’d been making peanut butter cookies one of the nights she’d first heard Kylo moving about in her home, and while he might be gone, it still felt like these cookies were a little piece of him, a little reminder from wherever he was now that he was still looking out for her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's long overdue and i'm so sorry!!!! i had to rewrite this a couple of times because it never felt right, and a lot of this part of the story shifted around on me while i was writing.  
> buuuuut here we are. say hello to leia, everyone.
> 
> @becksolo on twitter, come see me tweet while i'm working overnights until i work myself to death


	13. Thirteen

“You know, you’re probably actually legitimately crazy for this,” Rose’s voice came through the phone, tinny in quality.

“Oh, I know it.”

“But the nice kind of crazy, to be fair,” she went on. “Making cookies for some nice lady just because they remind you of your crush.”

Groaning, Rey shook her head, pausing in setting the cookies carefully in the tupperware she was going to be bringing them to the hospital in. “It’s not because they remind me of Kylo,” she said. What she declined to say out loud was the fact that the cookies were, absolutely, a distraction from the fact that Kylo’s absence was still leaving a painful void in her life. Instead, she said, “It’s just the nice thing to do.”

“Yes, it is, and I can’t deny that,” she said. “But you’re definitely underplaying how much Kylo plays into it.”

“I agreed before I had any idea that the cookies just happened to be the same kind that he likes,” she pointed out.

Rose sighed, and Rey could just picture her shaking her head at her. “But there’s also the factor of, you know, you’re dealing with a loss. It’s different, sure, but you’re, well, you’re an empathetic person. You get what she’s going through.”

“It’s nowhere close to the same level,” she pointed out, because that was one thing that Rey wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to fully rid herself of feeling a bit bad over.

“It’s close enough. It gives you a connection to her, and I don’t think that comparing whose situation is worse is going to help either of you,” Rose went on. “So, I think it’s good that you’re doing this for her. It just also happens to be a little bit crazy.”

Rey snapped the lid shut on the tupperware, shaking her head to herself. “Well, crazy does seem to be gravitating towards me as of late.”

“I can’t deny that,” she said. “Just go ahead and lean right on in to it, then.”

“I might as well, right?” she said. “You’re always going on about doing good things, after all.”

“I am, I am. And I’m very proud of you, you should know,” Rose told her.

“Thanks, Rose,” she said. “Anyway, I should probably get going. The cookies are all set to go, and I don’t want to keep her waiting too long. I’m not sure when visiting hours are over.”

“Have fun. Let me know when you get there, and when you head out, just in case,” she said.

Chuckling softly, Rey asked, “What would happen? You know, even if something did happen, I’d be at the hospital, which is basically the best possible place for something to happen to you.”

“I don’t know, anything is possible! Like we’ve established, weird things keep happening to you,” she said. Then, after a beat of silence, “Actually, more likely, this lady’s son is very attractive. And maybe your cookies are going to be enough to wake him from the dead.”

“Literal cookies?”

“You’re not taking this seriously,” Rose teased her.

“Not at all,” she said. “It’s just cookies, to a nice woman who is going through a tough time.”

“Okay, okay. Let me know how it goes.”

“Will do. Talk to you later, Rose.”

After they hung up, Rey quickly changed so that she was looking a little bit more presentable, before heading out to drive to the hospital. She started to get a little bit nervous as she drove, unsure of what exactly was making her nervous - if things were awkward, which they likely would be, then she could pretty easily just duck out after delivering the cookies - especially considering how nice Leia had been thus far, but it was a feeling that she couldn’t quite shake nonetheless.

She carried the cookies into the hospital in a bag that she had hoped might keep them warmer for a little bit longer, making a quick stop at the nurses’ station to check on where Ben’s room was before heading down the hall in the right direction, a little bit tense.

Hospitals always smelled terrible. They smelled clean, of course, but in a way that didn’t come off as natural, and just served to remind you of the fact that this was a place where things could go disastrously wrong if it wasn’t kept clean. There was a sort of grief that seemed to cling to the very building, the way that nicotine seeped into the walls of a chronic smoker’s home.

But Rey wasn’t going to let herself think about that - she was here to be a cookie delivery girl, bringing cookies to a mother and son who had been brought back together by some sort of terrible accident. Leia would enjoy a cookie or two and take comfort in it and the smell would rouse Ben Solo from his slumber. And if that didn’t happen, well, she probably wouldn’t hear about it. She could assume that was how that story ended.

As she reached the doorway, she lingered for just a moment, taking in a deep breath. Leia had looked put together  _ enough _ in their last meeting, and she’d sounded okay on the phone, but Rey wasn’t sure how it would be different, being in the room with him.

It took a great amount of willpower to make herself lift her hand to knock - she could just leave the cookies with the nurses to bring to Leia, and that was honestly probably what she should do, right? - but she made herself do it, and after a moment there was a soft answer of, “Come in.”

Rey pushed the door open gently, smiling softly as she caught sight of Leia inside and holding up the bag as she walked into the room. Once she was far enough into the room to see the occupant of the bed in the center of the room, she couldn’t help herself but steal a quick glance at him, and the bag of cookies immediately went tumbling to the ground, because surely life was messing with her again.

Because this… This  _ Ben Solo _ was absolutely Kylo. Her Kylo. His skin was pale - paler than it usually was, even considering how he was always a little bit more devoid of color than the average person as a ghost - and he was beat up and had plenty of wires and tubes hanging off of him and there was a long, thin wound stitched up across his face, but it was definitely him. By now, she was certain that she would recognize him anywhere.

_ But why here? In ‘Ben Solo’s hospital room? _

She suddenly remembered herself, crouching down to pick the cookies back up, clearing her throat. “I - “ she started, looking back at Leia, feeling her face grow warm. How long had she been staring at him?

“It’s alright,” Leia started, shaking her head. “It’s a shock, seeing someone like this.”

“No, no, it’s - “ she started and then fell silent again, at a loss for how exactly she was supposed to explain this one. Briefly she considered trying to still play it off, to tell her that she was simply struck dumb by Ben’s appearance, be it because of how handsome he was (wouldn’t a mother love to hear that about her son?) or because, as Leia had suggested, it was difficult to see someone in this shape. But she couldn’t lie. Especially not if this was Kylo - which it  _ had  _ to be - and there was any chance of anything happening in the future, a possibility that Rey wasn’t going to let go of, especially not now that this was happening. At the same time, however, there was no chance she could tell Leia the truth without sounding like an absolute crazy person.

So she turned back to Leia, clearing her throat before saying the best, most plausible lie that she could come up with. “It’s, he’s come into the bakery before. He was a regular, I… I had wondered why he wasn’t showing up anymore,” she said. It was close enough to the truth that she didn’t feel  _ too  _ bad for lying. Frankly speaking, she was proud of herself for coming up with a lie that plausible when she was feeling as shell shocked as she was.

“Really?” Leia asked, a little bit of surprise coloring her features as she looked back towards the man in the bed. “Well, I guess I can’t be that shocked. He always did have a sweet tooth.”

“Yeah?” Rey said, hoping that her voice came across as more casual and not too interested for a casual acquaintance. She suddenly found herself bursting with questions for Leia that she knew she couldn’t voice.

“Always,” she affirmed with a nod, her gaze still focused on the man on the bed. “It’s nice to know that some things haven’t changed.” She didn’t say anything for a moment, and Rey was dying to ask what she was referring to, what had happened between them, why Ben Solo was definitely also Kylo Ren, but she held her tongue. Leia looked back at her, asking, “How is he?”

That was a heavy question if Rey had ever heard one, and she wasn’t even sure that the older woman had any idea how tough of a question it was to answer. But it also hurt to realize that this was seemingly the only way that Leia had any way of learning about her son in the time they hadn’t been speaking, and she had to answer. “He’s… good,” she started. “It seems like he’s really successful.”

“That’s one word for it,” she said. “I - I’m sure you don’t know much, if anything, but… Whatever you can tell me, I’d like to know.”

And that was probably an invasion of Kylo’s privacy that he wouldn’t appreciate, but Rey could relate to that feeling of needing to know everything that she didn’t know about him. And he wasn’t exactly able to protest at the moment. “I know a little.”

“I’m sure he’s still working for that Snoke.”

“He is,” she confirmed with a small nod. “I don’t know what he does, but he’s mentioned his job.”

“Did you talk to him a lot?”

Rey nodded. “Sometimes more than others,” she said. “I like to think we became pretty close, all things considered.”

“Well, that’s good,” she said. “He’s spent a lot of his life isolating himself from other people. It’s nice to know he can play nice with the sweet girl from the bakery.”

Feeling her cheeks going warm, she shook her head slightly at Leia’s words. “He does have a… gruff exterior. But he’s a good man, and I’m grateful he allowed me to see that.”

There was a moment that passed between them where Rey could see that Leia was pleased to hear that news about her son, before her expression fell again. It was almost too easy, now that she knew, to see the resemblance between mother and son. “I don’t suppose he’s mentioned his family?” she asked.

“No,” Rey admitted, looking back at the man asleep on the bed. “He’s… private, though. There are a lot of things that he didn’t talk about.”

“That sounds like him,” Leia agreed, letting out a quiet sigh. “I suppose that might be for the best, anyway.”

They shifted gears then, with Leia suggesting that she take out the cookies. Rey was pleased to find that they were still plenty warm, even if Kylo wasn’t able to appreciate them, and when she pulled the lid off of the tupperware, the room was filled with the comforting, warm smell of the peanut butter and chocolate.

“They smell wonderful,” Leia told her, taking the container and setting them down gingerly on the bed beside him, not quite touching him, and they seemed to have a silent agreement to just watch him for a moment, leaving the cookies be. Rey knew better than to expect him to have any sort of immediate reaction to the smell, but she couldn’t help but hope anyway, as if maybe he might be Sleeping Beauty, woken not by true love’s kiss, but by the smell of fresh baked goods.

She wondered if he could hear them now, if anything they had been saying was getting through the fog. She wouldn’t expect that they would, but a part of her was so desperate to be able to reach him; after thinking he was gone, having him so close, closer than they’d ever really been, but still being unable to actually get through to him was like salt in an open wound. He looked at peace, something that he rarely did when he was awake, but more than for him to have peace she wanted him to be awake again.  _ Alive _ .

“Well,” Leia said as she sat back down, taking a cookie from the tupperware, “hopefully he’s at least having dreams that are a little bit sweeter now.”

Smiling softly at her, Rey nodded. “Here’s to hoping.” Selfishly, she hoped that she was there if he was dreaming. Hopefully his subconscious remembered her, and maybe it could connect the dots on where what he was smelling had come from.

They sat together and each ate a couple of the cookies - Rey only at Leia’s insisting that Ben would want her to - and not talking much more than that. It was quiet, but as comfortable as it could be.

For the most part, she kept her eyes on Kylo’s unconscious form, as if she were trying to commit him to memory. She didn’t know if she would get to see him again, she reminded herself, so maybe a little bit of staring was warranted. And then, for just the briefest of seconds, Rey thought that she might have seen something. Just a little movement of his hand, something that it was entirely possible that she had simply imagined. But it was enough to make her heart pound.

When the time for her to leave came, knowing that she ought not to overstay her welcome, Rey was surprised to receive a hug from Leia. “Would you like me to let you know if anything changes?”

“Oh,” she let out, a little bit surprised by the offer. “I… I’d like that. But you don’t have to, of course. If there’s any big changes, your priority shouldn’t be with keeping me in the loop.”

Leia nodded and squeezed her shoulder, giving her a look that she couldn’t quite read. “Thank you again for the cookies, Rey,” she told her. “We’ll talk soon.”

Rey took one last glance back at Kylo lying there on the bed, a soft sigh escaping her as she left the room to leave Leia on her own once more. She knew one thing, beyond a shadow of a doubt: she had to go see him again. Even if it was for the last time, even if he couldn’t hear her or say anything back, she had to talk to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Getting close to the end here, folks! I'm thinking we're probably looking at fifteen chapters total. My goal has always been to wrap this up before TRoS comes out, and we're a little closer to that deadline than I thought I'd be, but I'm just gonna keep on trucking
> 
> Come say hi, @becksolo on Twitter


	14. Fourteen

The problem with wanting to have a little bit of time to talk to Kylo without revealing everything about how she  _ actually _ knew him was that it might require that Leia not be around. And knowing when Leia wouldn’t be around would involve spying on her, which Rey was decently confident would stomp all over the lines of what was appropriate.

But Leia  _ had _ called her again with an open invitation to visit her and Ben whenever she wanted to - she suspected that it was a combination of the older woman’s own loneliness and some amount of perceptiveness that told her that Rey’s feelings for the man were more than she had let on. That made Rey itch a little bit, but it wasn’t as though it wasn’t true, but it did feel like she was imposing too much and perhaps like she needed to clear some things up about the nature of their relationship - or more importantly, the lack thereof. But she had seen While You Were Sleeping, and she could at least take comfort in knowing she hadn’t let things get  _ that _ out of hand.

So her spying took the form of stopping by to visit with Ben as various hours of the day, just to start to learn Leia’s routines. It felt gross. Like she was violating her privacy and abusing her trust.

What made it all the more terrible was that the more she spent time with Leia, the more she liked her and liked being around her. She was funny, and clever, and in the few meetings that Rey had had with Leia’s husband, he was just as amazing but in different ways. She felt guilty for keeping anything from either of these people, and she also just felt all the more confused about whatever it was that had apparently happened between them and Kylo. She could hardly imagine them doing something so terrible that it would make him write them off entirely as he seemed to have done, which left her feeling like she was missing some pretty important blanks in this story.

(In the midst of all of this, she neglected to mention to any of her friends, including Rose, what was happening that she suddenly so often had plans at random times during the day. It was opening a can of worms she wasn’t sure anyone was ready to deal with, and if Rose suspected anything, she hadn’t said so.)

For the most part, for a while Rey didn’t encounter any time when neither Leia or Han were by Kylo’s bedside or didn’t get there around the same time she did, which she supposed she could understand - if she suddenly found herself reconnected with her family, she would want to spend every waking second with them -  though it also made it hard to make any progress towards trying to get through to him. But it was a long shot anyway, so she could be patient.

It was a Sunday when she finally walked into the room to find that she was the only one there and it stayed that way.

She settled herself onto the uncomfortable chair by Kylo’s side, just looking at him for a moment. She had spent so much time in all of this staring at his face, that she was certain she had committed every feature of his face to memory.

It was so tempting to reach out and touch him. She could let her fingers smooth out his hair, which managed to get messy despite him laying perfectly still, or she could hold his hand just as she’d seen Leia do. But it felt like it was a step too far, and despite the one night where she had been desperate to hold onto him and gave into the impulse to touch him, she couldn’t step over that line now. Not at this point.

But still, she could talk to him.

“Hi, Kylo,” she started, her voice feeling too loud in the quiet of the room. Letting out a quiet little laugh, she said, “Bet it feels a little bit strange to hear that name after your mother keeps calling you Ben.”

She cleared her throat, looking down for a moment at his hand where it lay limp against the sheets covering him. From time to time during her visits, she had thought she might have seen a little flicker of movement from him, but she knew that it was most likely just wishful thinking. But she could never help herself but to keep watching him, just in case.

“I’m really curious about that, by the way,” she went on. “It’s… There are a lot of things that I’m curious about, if we’re going to be honest with ourselves.

“I feel like I know so much about you and not enough all at once. I know more about  _ Kylo _ than your parents do - good going, by the way - but I absolutely do not know anything about  _ Ben _ ,” she said, shaking her said. “And why it is that Ben stopped speaking to his family and apparently changed his name.”

She wanted so badly to get answers to these questions. Part of her was tempted to pry, to ask his parents what their side of things was, because surely they had to know what had caused their son to all but disappear on them, but that would be taking it a step too far.

“And that’s all on top of the questions that we already had -  _ why _ you were appearing in my apartment. I know we’ll probably never get an answer for that one, but it feels even stranger than ever now knowing that you  _ are _ real and that actually was your address and you’re not a ghost. Or, not a typical one. Not a dead one,” she went on, and she knew she was rambling, but it felt so wrong to be here with Kylo and to  _ not _ have him say anything to her in return. “But hey, at least there’s that. We don’t have to wonder about how you died, because you didn’t.”

She let out a dry laugh at herself at that, and she could feel tears pricking at her eyes. It felt wrong; she wasn’t the overly emotional type, never had been, and nothing in this situation really made it worth crying over. It wasn’t anything that she shouldn’t have been able to deal with.

“And I’m so… so damn grateful, you know? I don’t know what I would’ve done if you were actually dead for real.” She wasn’t going to let herself acknowledge the possibility that he might still die for real, not in her own head, much less out loud.

“But I just…” she stopped for a moment, her throat feeling as though it was going to close up as she tried to talk. “I miss you. I miss you more than I ever could have thought I would.” She took in a sniffle, cursing herself for suddenly getting so emotional about all this. “It’s like… You’re not haunting the house anymore, but you are. The memory of you is. It feels so wrong to not see you. I think even the cat misses you, he walks around meowing at all hours of the night.”

She allowed herself to ramble a little bit, because even if she was a mess, at least she was talking to him again, without having to pretend to have a completely different background with him than she actually did. It made her feel better about all of this, against all odds.

Once again, she was struck by the urge to reach out for him. She had only been able to touch him just the once, and at that point he had been so still and barely solid, and that little bit of contact between them had sent a chill seemingly right down to her bones. But here he was, flesh and bone, and she just wanted so badly to have some sort of evidence of that, to feel that he was warm and alive and his heart was beating.

And if it was just one little touch, well… Maybe that would be okay. So she let her hand inch forward off of her lap and into the open space between them, feeling like she was doing something bad the entire time she reached for him.

It was just a gentle touch, a little brush of her fingertips against the backs of his knuckles, but it was enough for her. She let herself linger like that for just a moment, just barely touching him, before the sound of someone clearing their throat behind her made her jump.

She jerked her hand back away from Kylo’s and turned so that she could look and see who was there. It was an older man with a serious look about him, and at first Rey thought he might have been one of the doctors that she simply hadn’t met yet, until she noticed his attire. Rather than the scrubs she would have expected, he was wearing jeans and a loose sweater.

“That was quite the show,” he said.

“I… What?” she started, immediately incredibly confused by this turn of events and wondering how much he had heard.

The man gestured towards the bed. “I expected to come here today and see him alone, laid up in this bed, blissfully unaware of my presence,” he said. “And instead I found a girl by his side, giving one of the loveliest little anguished declarations of love that I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s not - “

“No, of course it isn’t,” he said, letting out a quiet chuckle. “It never is.” He looked at her for a moment, his head tilting a little bit as he considered her. “But far more interesting… I would like some clarification on some of the things you said.”

“Okay, hold on,” she said. “First, I need to know who you are.”

“Ah. That would be fair, wouldn’t it?” he paused for a moment, and Rey almost thought that he wasn’t going to give her an answer. “I’m Luke. Ben’s uncle, Leia’s sister. I assume he’s never mentioned me?”

Rey shook her head slightly. “No, he hasn’t,” she said. “Leia’s mentioned you, briefly, but…” It was only within the context of saying that she had talked to her brother and doubted that he would ever come out to visit Ben. But she wasn’t about to say that, though it had made her all the more curious about his family drama.

“That’s about what I was expecting,” he said with a nod, a quiet sigh falling from his lips, looking a bit sad for a moment. As if catching himself in his self-pity, he shook his head, then the small smile returned to his lips as he looked at Rey again. “So who are you?”

And now that he had heard however much he had heard from when she was talking to Kylo, she wasn’t sure what the right answer was, what would be the safest thing to tell him. If this was Luke’s sister, would he turn around and tell her anything that she said? Would it matter? “I’m Rey,” she told him, and after a moment’s pause, she added, “I’m no one important.”

“Important enough to be sitting by my nephew’s side and making friends with Han and Leia.”

Rey nodded slowly, looking back in Kylo’s direction for a moment. “Well, yes, but it’s… There isn’t anything more to it than that,” she told him, though she knew it was a feeble excuse. There’s a lot more to it than that, just not at the level that Leia knows anything about. “He’s a friend. He came to the bakery I run.”

“I didn’t think that Ben made friends easily,” Luke commented. His eyes slide over to the man in the bed briefly before he looks back at Rey. “But I think you and I both know that it isn’t just that. And that’s what I’d like to hear about.” Then the man pulled up a chair, and Rey knew that she wasn’t going to get out of this situation too easily.

She weighed her options briefly, trying to figure out if there was a lie that seemed reasonable enough, like maybe it was all some kind of made up story or fantasy, but she knew it wouldn’t fly. And if she wanted any hope of being able to return to see Kylo again, honesty was the right answer.

“I live in the townhouse that Ky- Ben lived in, before this happened,” she said. The details of that were something that was still kind of fuzzy to her - how the ownership of her home could have traded hands while Kylo had been in a coma - but it was quite possibly one of the least interesting things happening in her world at the moment, so she had decided to let it be.

“So that’s how you know him?” he asked, and he leaned back and watched her in a way that gave her a sudden, vivid memory of a therapist she’d been sent to when she was young. He’d always let her steer the conversation, which had felt better while also somehow being stressful at the same time.

“It is,” she said. “He...  Alright, I’m going to sound like a crazy person, but you have to stick with me here, alright?”

Luke merely raised an eyebrow at her and nodded, gesturing for her to go on. Part of her took that to mean that he had already decided she was indeed a crazy person.

“Shortly after I moved in, I started to see him. Ben,” she said. “He’d appear almost at random, sometimes for longer stretches than others. We were both under the impression that he was a ghost, that he’d died.”

“All the while he was here, alive, and you had no idea,” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

“I didn’t,” she said. “I tried to look into it, I did. But that’s kind of difficult when the name he tells you apparently isn’t actually his name at all.”

Luke didn’t say anything for a moment, just looking at her and nodding slowly. Something about his gaze was incredibly disarming, and she could only imagine why it was that Kylo had never kept up a relationship with him. He asked her a few more questions, and eventually his final verdict seemed to be a negative one. “I think it would be for the best if you left, Rey.”

She couldn’t be sure whether he thought she was a stalker or genuinely insane and delusional or something just as unpleasant, but whatever it was, she felt a lick of shame down her back, and she decided against trying to argue with him. After one last glance in Kylo’s direction, she rose from her chair and left the room.

* * *

After her encounter with Luke, Rey decided to keep her distance. She didn’t hear from Leia, or Han for that matter, and so she had been left to assume that Luke had probably told them, and they had agreed that this crazy woman needed to stay away from their family.

In the days that followed, Rey felt like she had far too much free time. She knew that it was just what had always been normal, but it felt worse now. Her home was devoid of Kylo’s presence, and she no longer had visiting his bedside to occupy the time that he had taken up in her life. She just felt… alone, more than anything.

But she could adjust. She always had. She settled back into the routine she had before she’d met Leia - she worked plenty of hours, and she kept her home clean, and she spent time with her friends. It wasn’t perfect, but it was enough.

The problem with throwing herself into her work, of course, was that sometimes her work didn’t provide her enough to occupy her. It was a slow afternoon, and she more or less had nothing to do so she had wandered into the back with a book. Under different circumstances she might have considered just closing up early and heading home, but no. Anything to keep herself occupied.

The bell rang at the front of the shop to let her know that someone had come in the door, and she started to fish around for the slip of paper she was using as a bookmark. “I’ll be right with you,” she called out, starting to get back to her feet.

“I’d really rather not wait. I’ve had a very long day and this is quite the inconvenience,” a low voice answered in response, and though there was something familiar about it, she immediately focused more in on the fact that somebody could be so entitled.

Ready to give the man a piece of her mind, she pushed open the door separating the kitchen from the front, and stopped short as she caught sight of him.

“Kylo?”

The man before her was skinnier than Kylo had been when she’d last seen him up and about but at the same time he felt bigger than he had in that hospital bed, and there was more color in his cheeks. He was wearing sweatpants and it truly wasn’t fair that someone could look so good while so dressed down, but more than that, he was  _ here _ .

He looked down at his body, his hands patting his torso a couple of times as if he were taking stock of himself. “I think so,” he said.

She laughed and shook her head at him, hurrying around the counter and all but flinging herself at him. For a brief second, she worried that he might be bothered by the lack of warning - or permission, even - but he wrapped his arms around her in return and rested his chin against the top of her head, and she knew that it was okay. All of it was going to be okay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey, uh, Kylo's back. Neat
> 
> @becksolo on twitter


End file.
